Conceptualizing Reasoning, Problem-Solving, and Decision-Making in Serbian and English

Abstract

The paper presents a part of the study that sought to investigate the domain of mind. Due to space limitations, the present study focuses on the following mental processes: reasoning, problem-solving, and decision-making. We rely on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff/ Johnson, 2003 [1980]) in our analysis of the linguistic expressions that point to different representations of the selected mental processes. We analyze two corpora, one containing English news texts and the other containing Serbian news texts, to see if there is any correspondence between the way speakers of these two languages reason and speak about each process. The results indicate that there is a high degree of overlap between the two languages in respect of the most basic mappings and source domains that structure the given processes, while the differences are predominantly observed at the level of individual linguistic expressions.