Invariance Principle

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. In cognitive linguistics, the invariance principle is a simple attempt to explain similarities and differences between how an idea is understood in "ordinary" usage, and how it is understood when used as a conceptual metaphor. Kövecses provides the following examples based on the semantics of the English verb to give. The invariance principle offers the hypothesis that metaphor only maps components of meaning from the source language that remain coherent in the target context. The components of meaning that remain coherent in the target context retain their "basic structure" in some sense, so this is a form of invariance.