The study of effect of type of Image Schemas on narrative structure in Scientific and Literary Texts

The aim of this study is to examine and compare the image schemas in scientific and literary texts within the framework of cognitive linguistics. According to cognitive linguists, the importance of image schemas, as a part of language and thought, is that they, in terms of rudimentary embodied concepts, systematically provide the fundamental building blocks for more complex concepts. That makes their study inevitable in many fields. In this study, we examined Johnson’s basic image schemas (i.e. force, path, and containment) in scientific and literary texts, as two extremely different genres. We used qualitative, descriptive, and inferential methods in our examination. The results show that, despite their significant difference (p<.05), all three schemas are used in both scientific and literary genres. The most frequent schemas in scientific and literary texts were containment schemas (56%) and path schemas (52%), respectively. There also was a significant difference between schematic (9%) and non-schematic (91%) sentences (p<.05). We suggested that the observed difference between the two genres may be due to the fact that scientific concepts are more abstract, and the use of schemas facilitates their understanding.