Innovation in Language Learning

This study investigates how the ROAD concept—defined as something one takes to reach a destination—is expressed and extended in English and Japanese. In Japanese, 道 (michi/dou) broadly covers meanings such as road, way, and path, whereas English tends to diversify these meanings across distinct lexical items. For example, the Japanese term 産道 (sandou) is translated as birth canal, reflecting how English incorporates the notion of surrounding fluid space, in contrast to the straightforward ‘path’ interpretation in Japanese. Focusing on the English word way, the study identifies its metaphorical extensions including DIRECTION (“He looked my way”), METHOD (“Hold the chopsticks in this way”), MANNER (“a common way to greet”), and EXTENT (“way over budget”). These meanings emerge from embodied experiences related to physical movement and spatial orientation. In Japanese, however, such abstract senses are largely represented using 方 (hou/kata), as in 方向, 方法, やり方, and 途方もなく. While both languages use spatial metaphor as a basis for abstraction, they assign extended meanings to different lexical roots. This contrast reveals underlying cognitive patterns and cultural preferences in semantic categorization. Through a cognitive semantic lens, the analysis highlights how linguistic systems can diverge in how they structure and expand foundational concepts. These findings may offer useful insights for cross-linguistic understanding, particularly in comparative lexical semantics and translation studies.