2014/12/04 by Benjamin W. Dreyfus, Ayush Gupta, Dreyfus, Benjamin W. +3 · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · Psychology · #Advanced Text Analysis Techniques #FOS: Physical sciences #Language, Metaphor, and Cognition #Physics Education (physics.ed-ph) #linguistics and terminology studies #physics.ed-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1412.1693
20 pages, 14 figures. Accepted to International Journal of Science Education. The first two authors contributed equally to the data analysis and production of this paper
openalex publication_date 2014/12/04 · arxiv created 2014/12/05 · arxiv updated 2014/12/08 · openalex created_date 2022/09/30 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Energy is an abstract science concept, so the ways that we think and talk about energy rely heavily on ontological metaphors: metaphors for what kind of thing energy is. Two commonly used ontological metaphors for energy are energy as a substance and energy as a vertical location. Our previous work has demonstrated that students and experts can productively use both the substance and location ontologies for energy. In this paper, we use Fauconnier and Turner's conceptual blending framework to demonstrate that experts and novices can successfully blend the substance and location ontologies into a coherent mental model in order to reason about energy. Our data come from classroom recordings of a physics professor teaching a physics course for the life sciences, and from an interview with an undergraduate student in that course. We analyze these data using predicate analysis and gesture analysis, looking at verbal utterances, gestures, and the interaction between them. This analysis yields evidence that the speakers are blending the substance and location ontologies into a single blended mental space.