The building blocks
Cognitive primitives.
The irreducible units from which every signature is built: image schemas and basic domains (Evans & Green 2006). Each doubles as a literal spatial structure and a metaphoric source domain. Click a primitive to see what it licenses and which signatures stand on it.
A cognitive primitive is a basic, pre-linguistic unit of meaning — a shape we know from the body and the world, like a CONTAINER (inside / outside), a PATH (going from here to there), or VERTICALITY (up / down). The analysis uses these shapes to explain why an English morpheme ends up mapping to a given Vietnamese one. Pick a primitive below to see the senses built on it.
primitive → a signature (one specific sense of that shape, e.g. "below in physical space") → the English/Vietnamese morpheme mappings that realise that sense.
Image-schema inventory
The complete published list (Evans & Green, Table 6.3): used = realised by a signature here; the rest is headroom a new morpheme can land on.
Construal parameters
A signature selects a region/value of its primitives via these parameters (Evans & Green section 6.1.5).
Source: Evans, V. & Green, M. (2006) Cognitive Linguistics: An Introduction — image schemas (Table 6.3), basic/abstract domains (7.3.2), conceptual metaphor (Ch 9), force dynamics (15.2.7). Drawn live from the English–Vietnamese Analytical Mapping database.