Abstract:

We, on the basis of pluralism proposed by post modernist philosophy, put forward “the View of Elephant & Leopard” in Embodied Cognitive Linguistics, with the intention of redressing two idioms in Chinese “blind men and elephant (draw conclusions from incomplete data) ” and “seeing a leopard only by a glimpse of few dots”, for they are usually meant for derogatory usage. But we think it is a basic principle for epistemology, because we often recognize the whole by partial observation, and the human beings are forever on the way to metonymically (part for whole) know the world. So does the linguistic research, for linguists have often explained the nature of language from one standpoint or one perspective, thus resulting so many linguistic theories and schools, which have proven that the scholars always depend on pluralism and “the View of Elephant and Leopard” for the recognition and research of language.