Metaphor and metonymy in the conception of emotion in different cultures

---

The reason for this may be that this source domain is very natural and obvious for most of us when talking about the loved one; this naturalness and obviousness does not make it even appear a metaphor. But in a set of interviews conducted by Ted Sablay in , another set of American college students did come up with the UNITY metaphor in their conceptualization of romantic love.

The discussion of the love metaphors above allows us to return to another of our three questions in the introduction: Do the metaphors for the emotions change with time? This conceptual metaphor has been with us for a long time and was made famous and popular by Plato. If man were loved by wife, then thee; If ever wife was happy in a man, Compare with me, ye women, if you can. I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold Or all the riches that the East doth hold. My love is such that rivers cannot quench, Nor ought but love from thee, give recompense.

Thy love is such I can no way repay. The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray. All of these are made use of in the poem: If ever two were one, then surely we. Lust Metaphors Lakoff and I collected examples of metaphors used for the comprehen- sion of lust or sexual desire. What we found was reported in Lakoff You bring out the beast in me. Her whole body exploded in passion.

Account Options

She turned me on. She was his latest conquest. She knocked me off my feet. There were waves of passion. Lakoff and I found these conceptual and linguistic metaphors scat- tered throughout a variety of sources, including informal conversa- tions, magazines, movies, pop literature, et cetera. This explains why some of the examples may appear forced and without context. The unsystematic character of gathering data inevitably leads one to ask: Who actually uses these linguistic metaphors in a natural way, and are all these conceptual metaphors equally common in natural usage?

These are extremely important questions in the enterprise I am advo- cating. Without answering them, we cannot get a sense of the reality of this kind of metaphorical emotion language for certain communities of speakers. Then we tried to categorize these examples according to source concepts.

This resulted in a little over linguistic examples altogether. Only those conceptual metaphors and metony- mies are presented that manifested themselves in at least 5 linguistic examples in our corpus. Nevertheless, it helps us make several important observations. For them, linguistic metaphors and metonymies such as the ones given above provide the normal ways of talking about lust.

Third, the conceptualization of lust by these speakers is couched predominantly in two metaphorical source domains: The metaphors that emerged are as follows: Her self-esteem did not let her do it. His pride was injured. That put a dent in his pride. Pride is a concept that is conceptualized metaphorically to only a small degree.

She felt that her very being would demolish in the heat. He kindled her body into savage excitement. He fell to her like a starved man might fall to food. Her appetities were hot and uninhibited. He moved with animal ferocity. WAR 21 She lost the battle. He took her mouth in a preliminary conquest. He enticed them both in the direction of madness. He was drowning in his own desire. His presence made her dizzy with pleasure. Her body joined forces with his, demolishing her control.

His touch tormented her. They united in the end. He possessed her body. There was no denying the power of his sexual magnetism. He played with her body. She broke the spell he weaved around her. She was driven by lust. He went hot all over just to think about it. Shame Metaphors In presenting the major metaphorical source domains for shame, I rely on work by Holland and Kipnis and Pape In listing the metaphors, I will not distinguish between the related concepts of shame and embarrassment, though the two are clearly distinct.

The concept of shame will be used throughout. I felt so naked; so exposed. I was caught with my pants down. He suffered much embarrassment in his youth. I felt this big. I wanted to bury my head in the sand. I wished the ground would just swallow me up. I tried to regain my composure.

I felt like two cents waiting for change. Guilt was weighing him down. This is not a general metaphor for emotions, but it is clearly important for understanding shame. One would think that it is more like a conceptual metonymy than a meta- phor. I will argue in the next chapter that it is both. Surprise Metaphors The language and metaphors of surprise were studied by Kendrick- Murdock Her results indicate that most of our understanding of surprise comes from three metaphorical source domains: I was staggered by the report.

I just came apart at the seams. I was overwhelmed by surprise. Let us observe just two points. Second, not surprisingly, surprise is the least metaphorically comprehended con- cept on our list. The reason possibly is that surprise is not a socially very complex phenomenon, and, consequently, there is not a great amount of conceptual content to be associated with it.

Conclusion To conclude this chapter, we found that the emotion concepts under investigation are comprehended via a large number of conceptual metaphors, ranging from 3 surprise to 24 love. Finally, as the example of the UNITY metaphor for love indicates, conceptual metaphors may have stability over time. The general issue I wish to raise in this chapter can be put in the following way: In other words, the question is whether the source domains of emotion metaphors have application outside the concept of emotion or only inside it.

This is an important question to ask because it has bearings on how we conceive of the structure of our conceptual system. What is at issue is whether we understand an abstract domain like emotion in a unique way e. I will make use of this notion in relation to the emotions. Obviously, to an- swer our questions in an adequate way, we would have to examine all the metaphors of all emotion concepts.

Nevertheless, we can begin to answer the questions in a tentative manner. In this chapter, I will look at the nine emotion concepts and the metaphorical source domains that we saw in the previous chapter: I will also attempt to give an explanation of why this is the case. Source Domains and the Emotions to Which They Apply In the previous chapter, we saw which emotion concepts are associ- ated with which metaphorical source domains.

Now we are in a posi- tion to make generalizations about the application of the particular source domains to target emotion concepts. We will have to take each of the source domains that were found in the previous chapter and check with which target emotion concept s they occur. I did not even bother to list these in the previous chapter, be- cause they are so general. Emotion Metaphors 37 Container. In many ways, this is the major metaphorical source do- main for emotions. It seems to occur with all the emotions we have looked at above.

This seems to be a near-universal way of conceptualizing the body in relation to the emotions. Consequently, emotions in many cultures throughout the world are seen as occurrences inside the body. This topic will be further explored in chapter 8. Natural Force and Physical Force. It is not always easy to distinguish physical forces from natural ones. We can perhaps suggest that natu- ral forces constitute a subcase of physical forces.

Physical forces can also take a variety of forms. They include such physical phenomena as heat, attraction of bodies, abrupt physical con- tact between bodies, and the like. Perhaps with the exception of pride and shame, all the emotion concepts described in the previous section make use of physical force as a source domain. The source domain of social superior appears to apply to most of the emotion concepts under consideration. In our survey, it has not been found with happiness, sadness, shame, and lust, but it is easily conceivable with these emotions as well.

However, it is un- likely to occur with surprise, which is a short-lived, transitory event, unlike the habitual state captured by the social superior metaphor in its application to the other emotions.

Opponent, Captive Animal, Insanity. These source domains seem to have a similar distribution to that of social superior, that is, they are shared by roughly the same emotion concepts. The concept of divided self as explained in the previous chapter appears in the conceptualization of most of the emotions un- der study. The emotion concepts that clearly take burden as a meta- phorical image are anger, fear, sadness, and shame guilt.

The ones that do not seem to take it include happiness, pride, and surprise. It is imaginable that love and lust can make use of it in some of their nonprototypical applications i. Thus, the distribution of this source domain comes close to that of burden. Source Domains That Apply to Some Emotions There are source domains associated with the emotion concepts under consideration here that are less general than the ones mentioned above; they do not apply to most emotions, but they apply to at least two.

The source domain of economic value applies to pride and shame. In pride, the subject of the emotion may assign either a high too much pride or a low too little pride value to himself or herself, whereas in shame the value is low. This is a set of seemingly disparate source concepts. What is common to them is the desire to obtain an object corresponding either to an emotion or the object of an emo- tion. Their application seems to be limited to love and lust. Machine, Animal Aggression, and Hunger. These source domains can be found in the conceptualization of anger and lust.

Lakoff discusses these interesting parallels in the American understanding of anger and lust. These metaphorical source domains character- ize love and lust. As the survey reported in chapter 2 shows, not only love but also lust can take magic and unity as its source.

This indicates that the journey metaphor is marginal but present in the comprehen- sion of lust. A possible reason for the importance of the journey meta- phor in love and its marginal status in lust and other emotions will be offered in chapter 6. Physical damage is used in the conceptualization of pride and shame, two obviously related emotions. For a detailed ex- amination of the relationship between the two, see Holland and Kip- nis, Physical damage is intended here in the sense of visible damage as a result of one physical object knocking into another as in one car making a dent in another.

Source Domains That Apply to One Emotion As our survey in chapter 2 shows, some of the metaphorical source domains occur with only a single emotion concept. I will simply list these below, together with the emotion to which they apply. I will return to this question in a later section. In order to see whether these source domains are limited to the general category of emotion or whether they extend beyond it, we have to examine the aspects of emotion concepts that the shared source domains focus on. That is, there are metaphors whose task is to express whether an emotion exists or does not exist.

The major conceptual metaphors with this function include: These metaphors clearly extend beyond the domain of emotion. In the next chapter, I will discuss the Event Struc- ture metaphor in detail. Thus the metaphors above are the standard ways of conceptualizing the existence or nonexistence of emotional states.

Intensity Intensity is a further aspect of emotion concepts that is highlighted by several metaphors. The prototypical emotion concepts are regarded as highly intense states. Given these source domains and given that intensity is their main focus, we get the general metaphors: In the former case there is more substance in the container than in the latter. Again, the metaphors have application beyond the domain of emo- tion. We can present them in this more general usage in the following way: In all of these cases, it is intensity that is the focus of the metaphor.

Hence emotions are viewed as happening to us. Thus the more general metaphor would be something like this: Con- trol is a complex notion that, in the realm of emotion at least, can be broken down into three parts, or stages: Given these stages, the source domains tend to focus on different stages: Focus on Attempt at Control: These and many other examples show that the metaphorical source domains used in the understanding of the control aspect of emotion are not unique to the domain of emotion, but form a part of a much larger system that includes the emotion domain.

Thus, one can talk of a sick or a healthy relationship. There are additional source domains that focus on this aspect of emotion concepts: Interestingly, these source domains only apply to happiness— sadness, pride—shame, and affection—indifference, which are inher- ently positive or negative. Emotions like anger, fear, romantic love, lust, and surprise are not conceptualized as inherently good or bad, although they may make use of the hot—cold but not the warm—cold schema.

The metaphors involving these source domains have a wider scope than the domain of emotion. For a discussion of some of these cases, see Lakoff and Johnson, This is the aspect of emotion concepts that the source domains of burden focuses on. In the other, the desire consists of having the emotion.

Thus, we hunger for love, but we do not hunger for anger, though our anger can be said to be insatiable. Nonphysical Unity The unity metaphor has a wide scope of application outside the emo- tion domain love and lust. One can unite with God and we can talk about the unity of body and mind. The unity metaphor for love and lust is a special case of this metaphor. Progress This source domain does not apply to most of the emotion concepts under investigation. The main dimension on which the journey metaphor focuses seems to be progress with respect to a goal.

We will return to the discussion of the journey metaphor in the next chapter. Harm We have seen that the source domain of physical damage applies pri- marily to two emotion concepts: However, we can also see it in other emotion concepts, such as anger e. One kind of emotional harm is loss of control. This explains some of the overlap with metaphors of loss of control. As we just saw, the dimension of progress is not typical of the emotions. The importance of this, as far as I can see, is that the aspects of emotion concepts discovered on the basis of conceptual metaphors used in English are not limited to the conceptual system of speakers of English.

Instead, assuming that Wierzbicka is right, it seems that the aspects of emotion concepts may have universal application. One may conjecture, though, that if the other aspects have universal application, then these latter three must as well. This second alternative seems viable, given the general Western emphasis on controlling emotion and regarding the emotions as things that are harmful to the proper functioning of the Western ideal of a rational person.

For example, trespassing leads to anger, dancing about in being off the ground indicates happiness, and decrease in size shows that a person is ashamed or embarrassed. Some of them have to do with causes of emotion, whereas some of them have to do with effects of emotion. Both the causes and the effects in ques- tion appear to be unique to a given emotion.

Emotion Metaphors 49 More generally, we can say that emotions can be, and are, compre- hended via both their assumed typical causes and their assumed typ- ical effects. Emotion Is a Cause of That Emotion: Conclusions We began with the question of whether there are any source domains that are unique to the conceptualization of the emotion domain. Here I have not investigated the issue of precisely how large these portions are.

In the chapter on rela- tionships, I will make the same general claim in relation to the concept of friendship. I suggested that this occurs when, by means of a regular metonymic process, we understand an emotion concept via its cause or effect. Events and Emotions The Subcategorization of Emotions Emotions are commonly categorized in two major ways.

On the other hand, laymen and early scholars think of emotions as a subcategory of passions, as opposed to actions. Indeed, the question arises: Are the emotions subcategories of states, passions, events, or actions, or any combination of these? For example, some anthropologists consider emotions as events e.

It seems, however, that these latter subcategori- zations are outside the mainstream ways of classifying emotions. It is in this light that it becomes important to examine the details of the subcategorization of emotion in the most natural folk theory, namely, language. The language on the basis of which I will consider the nature of the subcategorization of emotion is English. Events in general, including changes of states, actions, activities, et cetera, are understood metaphorically in terms of physical movement, physical force, and physical space.

It is these abstract con- cepts to which the notions of physical space, force, and motion apply, yielding conceptual metaphors that enable speakers to get a clearer understanding of them. Similarly, one of the most natural ways of referring to emotional states is by making use of this metaphor. Events and Emotions 53 The notion of change is viewed as physical movement into or out of bounded regions. Events have a causal aspect. Causes are metaphorical forces within event structure. For example, we can say that a person goes on with what he is doing, that he or she went back to sleep, that he or she exercised to the point of exhaustion.

How- ever, work is not a motion verb itself though the words up and into are particles expressing motion, but they simply indicate change of state. A subclass of events is associated with purpose, and purposes are commonly viewed as metaphorical destinations. An aspect of change and action is the deliberate use of some means of change of state or action. A possible situation where this might occur is one in which a person seeks psychiatric help, as a result of which he can claim to have achieved some emotional feeling through training.

He got over his divorce. Features of the terrain: Quit pushing me around. Lack of energy source: A nonemotional example would be: One can be at a crossroads both as regards a project and a love relationship. Similarly, both a project and a love relationship can be described as a long, bumpy road. This has three special cases: Things are going against me these days. The tide of events. Events and Emotions 55 It is debatable whether this submetaphor applies to the emotions.

One can think of cases of emotion language that seem somewhat similar to the examples above: He got carried away. He held back his anger. We can now address the issue of the degree of the overlap. What I would like to do is point out the generalizations that emerge from the comparison of statements and descriptive phrases about emotions with those about events. Let us turn to the details. The emotional state of a person corresponds to a bounded region. The state of a person changes from a nonemotional state to an emo- tional one. This change is conceptualized as motion. The change from a nonemotional to an emotional state is caused by an entity or an event.

This cause of emotion is seen as a physical force. The reason is obvious: In the folk understanding, emotions are predominantly not actions but passions, and the use of ordinary language reveals this. But then why is it that the other four submetaphors mentioned above appear to be used of the emotions? It should be noticed that they appear to be applicable only to love, mar- riage, and some other relationships, which may have a purposive component.

Couples in love and marriage may set goals that they want to achieve. However, there are no such explicit goals associated with emotions such as anger, fear, happiness, pride, and so forth. These latter emotions are assumed to happen to people and love of course shares this property with them — as shown by the phrase fall in love , while love may also have a clear purposive aspect which the other emotions do not share with love. To the extent that love can be associated with long-term goals, it can be regarded as an activity on a par with something like working on a project.

This explains why both will have goal-based metaphors in common. If action is motion and causes are forces, then control over action is control over motion. It is the particular acts or events associated with particular emotions that are controlled by the subject of emotion and that are metaphorically conceived as motion and their control as control over motion. The control of emotional acts or events as control over motion is conscious and is intended by the subject of emotion in the examples above. Linguistic examples of this entailment are the sentences: That is, the desire that controls emotional action is not intended by the subject of emotion.

Thus, here we have a case of the conceptualization of emotion as something closer to passion than to action. Fourth, there are many phrases in English that describe emotional experiences that involve verbs of motion. Examples of such verbal phrases include swept away, moved, blown away, transported, carried away, and others.

Why is this so? The picture that has emerged so far is that emotions are assumed to lead to certain behav- ioral responses that the self undergoes. In this scheme, emotion itself becomes a cause relative to the response it produces. Thus the emotion is conceptualized as a force and the effect of the emotion, that is, the behavioral responses, as the effects of the force. Given this, it makes sense that emotional responses, that is, caused events as opposed to intended actions , should be conceptualized not as self-propelled but as other-propelled motions.

In other words, in the folk theory emotions are not simply states but also very clearly events. The reason is that emotions are assumed to be internal — not external — phenomena in the folk theory under discussion. Hence the metaphor for external events cannot apply. We can see in Figure 4. Obviously, there is more to passion than this.

The complexity of passion involves at least two more meta- phors that we did not examine in the chapter: These complexities concerning the passions will be taken up in more detail in the next chapter. By examining the extent to which this general metaphor applies to the emotions, we uncovered the several ways in which emotion is subca- tegorized. Based on this examination, it appears that we think and talk about the emotions as states, events, actions, and passions all at the same time.

This book challenges the validity of this view and offers a new way of looking at emotion concepts and the metaphors that characterize them. We saw in the previous chapter that emotions are commonly con- ceptualized as causes that lead to certain behavioral responses. In fact, this seems to be the predominant concep- tion of emotions in Western cultures. Furthermore, this is a metaphor that applies to all basic and many nonbasic emotions. For all these reasons, it plays a very impor- tant role in how we think about the emotions in general.

There are two points I would like to make and stress in this chapter. The other is that these metaphors instantiate the generic-level metaphor in very differ- ent ways, capturing very different aspects of emotional experience. Given the second claim, we can get an idea of the details and richness of the conceptualization of emotion — without losing sight of its deep underlying coherence. There is considerable agreement among scholars that this schema is one of the basic image schemas that structures the con- ceptual system. This is how Leonard Talmy , who studied it most extensively, characterizes the schema: The primary distinction that language marks here is a role difference between the two entities exerting the forces.

One force-exerting entity is singled out for focal attention — the salient issue in the interaction is whether this entity is able to manifest its force tendency or, on the con- trary, is overcome. Agonist Antagonist Intrinsic force tendency: As a result of the interac- tion, the Agonist will typically cease to be inactive and will produce a response.

Typically, though not exclusively, the Agonist is instantiated by the rational self that is or will be emotional, while the Antagonist is instantiated by the cause of emotion or the emotion itself. As we will shortly see in Table 5. The question that immediately arises is, of course, precisely how the set of mappings above applies to the emotion domain. As we will see, there are numerous ways in which this abstract force schema can Table 5. In this sense, then, the cause of emotion is even more naturally and obviously thought of as a cause, and hence a force, than emotion itself.

Moreover, some meta- phors will be shown to play some role in the conceptualization of both parts of the skeletal emotion scenario just sketched. To give the reader an initial sense of the analyses to follow, Table 5. However, it should be kept in mind that this structure is used only to give some order to the discussion of the metaphors. This is why we have an extremely rich understanding of the concept of emotion in the lan- guage-based folk model.

Forgot Password?

The intrinsic force tendency of the Antagonist: The intrinsic force tendency of Agonist: The intrinsic force tendency of the Agonist: In this metaphor complex, the level of the emotion substance may go up inside the container; if it does, the substance creates perceivable pressure on the container; the pressure may increase to the point that the substance goes out of the container.

The Force of Emotion 67 Due to the causal relationship between the emotion and the action- response, emotions are seen as motivations relative to the action- response. That is, in this scheme the emotion is seen as an internal motivation for action i. The motivation is conceptual- ized as an internal force, while the action produced is viewed as the external effect of this internal force. The greater the intensity of inter- nal pressure, the greater is the degree of motivation to respond emo- tionally.

Thus, we can add the following to the mappings above: More will be said about this aspect later. An emotional response is performed. This may happen in two ways: Nonethe- less, it would be strange, at least in English, to talk about someone exploding with joy, where explosion is associated with deliberately causing damage to others in a violent way. We can talk about the resultant action of the resultant action. However, it is not claimed that all external emotional responses are internally motivated. When this is the case, we do not have the con- ceptualization of emotions as internal forces internal pressure but simply as substances in the body-container.

Emotion Is an Opponent. The emotions are also conceptualized as op- ponents in a struggle. There are a number of linguistic examples to show this: The Force of Emotion 69 Table 5. Opponent in a struggle. He was seized by emotion. He was struggling with his emotions. I was gripped by emotion. She was overcome by emotion.

The struggle takes place between the self and an emotion as oppo- nents. The self attempts to maintain control over the emotion. Thus the struggle is an attempt for emotional control. There are two outcomes to the struggle: In this metaphor it is assumed that it is better to maintain rational control than to give in to the emotions. This is why the rational self applies a counterforce in an attempt to control the causal force of the emotion. Emotion Is a Wild Animal. His emotions ran away with him. She kept her emotions in check.

Obviously, the struggle be- tween the master and the animal corresponds to the struggle for emo- tional control. The animal is trying to get away but is held back by the master. In attempting to get away, it exerts a force on the master. Emotion Is a Social Force. Emotions can also be viewed as social forces. Let us look at some examples: He is ruled by anger. She is driven by fear. His whole life is governed by passion.

Your actions are dictated by emotion. According to this metaphor, the emotion, that is, the social superior, has control over the rational self. The social effect of the superior on the self is the emotional effect of the emotion on the self see Table 5. In this case of the application of force dynamics, there is no longer any struggle between the superior and the inferior forces. The superior social force, that is, the emotion, controls the inferior one, that is, the irra- tional self which was a rational self before the struggle.

It is this resulting state that is shown in the diagram. The overall result is that this metaphor primarily applies to a per- son whose behavior is controlled by emotion, not by reason. Thus, the idea that this particular metaphor adds to the conception of emotion is that it is a way of conceptualizing habitual tendencies, or disposi- tions, not so much momentary states or actions. A superior has long- term control over an inferior, whose behavior is determined by the superior over a long period of time.

Emotion Is a Natural Force. I was swept off my feet. As the second example indicates, one of the effects of a natural force on an entity may be that it moves the entity from one location to another. The instantiation of the metaphor can be seen in Table 5. Obviously, only the passions or very intense forms of other emotions are conceptualized this way.

This is the single most important property of emotion in the folk theory. Emotion Is a Mental Force. This metaphor comes in several versions. The mental force may be a force coming from a human or a drug. We can begin the analysis of this metaphor with some examples: Our emotions often fool us. His emotions deceived him. She was misled by her emotions. Eventually, however, the trickster or deceiver deceives its victim, and correspondingly the emotion makes the rational self irra- tional.

In other words, the self who is in an emotional state is depicted by this metaphor as being irrational. He is mad with desire. I was crazy with emotion. Intense emotion is a state of the ultimate lack of control. In the source domain of the metaphor, a normal person becomes insane as a result of this intense psychological force. The Force of Emotion 75 ways. Thus we have the additional mapping: She was consumed by passion. The events kindled several emotions in him. I am burning with emotion. They were hot with passion. To account for them, consider how the source and target domains of this metaphor instantiate the generic-level force metaphor for emotion see Table 5.

Intensity in general is commonly conceptualized as heat see chap- ter 3. Thus many states and actions that have an intensity aspect are comprehended via the concept HEAT. Thus, one can be hot with anger, romantic love, and sexual desire. These emotions are seen as very intense and energized states. A mapping not shown above is that various degrees of heat corre- spond to various degrees of intensity of emotion and lack of heat corresponds to lack of emotion. These emotions are conceptualized at a lower level of heat e. But there are other reasons as well. The heat can make the object hot.

As previously, the physical force, that is, here the heat-force, corresponds to the emotion. But the particular effect of the heat-force may also be damage to the thing burning, that is, damage to the self. The damage to another object is the damage to the other person. This response constitutes deliberate aggressive behavior. Emotion Is a Physiological Force. These come in several kinds: His anger was insatiable. As was noted in chapter 3, the hunger for food corresponds to the desire for either the emotion e.

When this is the case, the person who is hungry is the person who would like to but does not have the emotion. When the food corresponds to action in the latter, the wild animal that is insatiably hungry is the emotion itself that causes the self to perform an action. The Force of Emotion 79 Table 5. The major difference seems to be that the emotion instantiates neither the Agonist nor the Antagonist.

What is at issue is the desire for emotion. Let us look at the details in Table 5. Emotion Is Physical Agitation. I am all shook up. She was all worked up. Why are you upset? The children were disturbed by what they saw. The examples are based on the instantiations in Table 5. According to this application of the metaphor, emotion is a dis- Table 5. The Force of Emotion 81 turbed state of mind that arises from some cause.

Version 2 presents a different situation both regarding scope and conceptual organization. I stood there trembling with emotion.

He quivered all over with emotion. As a result of what she felt, shivers ran up and down her spine. He was quaking in his boots. These examples suggest bodily agitation that arises from some emo- tion as again indicated by the preposition with — not a disturbed state of mind as previously. Agitation is a kind of incapacity, bodily or mental incapacity; when it happens, the self is unable to act normally. Emotion Is a Burden. She is weighed down by sadness. He felt good after he unburdened himself.

When they left the dark forest behind, he felt relieved. Correspondingly, the intrinsic force tendency of emotion i. They gravitated toward each other immediately. I am attracted to her. She found him irresistible. In other words, our con- cept of emotion is understood as physical effect produced by a cause. This makes sense because our emotions are conceptualized as re- sponses to a situation the cause of emotion. We should notice about these mappings that they apply to com- pletely different parts of our emotion scenario in the folk theory of emotion than the ones we have dealt with previously.

In the cases above, we had the following picture: Emotion as Antagonist has a force tendency; the force tendency manifests itself in the self as Ago- nist; the result is some emotional effect on the part of the self. The two causal chains complement each other, in that one captures what happens before an emotion comes into being, and the other captures what happens afterward. Thus, we can put them to- gether in the following way to get a complete picture of the skeletal scenario that forms the basis of the most pervasive folk theory of emo- tion coded into English: If we place this information in the schema, we get: The various emo- tion metaphor source domains are instantiations of the concept of force.

This is a conclusion that places prior studies of emotion meta- phors in a new light. At a generic level, emotion and all the source domains share what Fauconnier and Turner e. This force space structures not only the particular source domains but also the concept of emotion, yielding the skeletal structure: This provides an extremely basic structure for emotion that is metaphorical.

The conclusion to draw from all this is that there is very little about the emotions that is not metaphorically conceived. What exactly this experiential basis consists in will be dealt with in the chapter on the universal aspects of conceptualizing the emotions. I will come back to the discussion of this issue in chapter 7. As has been stressed in this chapter, the basic schema of emotion presented above is only a skeletal one. I will present this conceptually much richer cultural model in chapter 7, where I will discuss the re- lationship between folk and expert theories.

Emotions and Relationships So far we have seen a wide variety of metaphors for the emotions. My goals in this chapter are twofold: Part of the task will be to see whether human relationships such as these are conceptual- ized metaphorically in the same way the domain of emotion is concep- tualized. My main focus will be on the concept of friendship.

This is because extensive studies of love and marriage have already been made using the methodology of detailed metaphor analysis see, e. In one, 17 adults, all native speakers of American English, were interviewed about the topic of friendship. The interviews were conducted by three native speakers of American English: All had college degrees or were attending college at the time of the interviews.

In the other method, students at Rutgers University, in New Jersey, were assigned the task of writing any number of sen- tences with the word friendship or friend in them. In this way, more than sentences were collected. The analysis of friendship in the present study is based exclusively on these two databases. Communication between friends is a special case of communication in general as described, e. What I will try to do in this section is to see the extent to which this is the case and what the details of the process are.

Communication is a multifaceted notion in the American concep- tion of friendship. It involves such aspects as what the kinds of things are that are communicated, how they can be communicated, and what the communicators themselves are like. In this section, I will deal with each of these issues under three interrelated metaphors: However, these metaphors should be regarded merely as convenient headings under which the discussion to follow is organized. Other, equally important, metaphors will also be presented.

Experiences as Objects A feature of friendship that occurs frequently in the data is sharing: Events, emotions, and ideas information are all experiences that are commonly conceptualized as objects. As the examples above tell us, these experiences are to be shared in friendship. Indeed, one of the most common expressions that people used in the data in con- nection with friendship was sharing experiences. The Conduit Metaphor Experiences can be shared either directly or indirectly. In the case of indirect sharing, one person will transfer his or her experience OBJECTS to the other, as a result of which they will share the relevant experience.

Metaphor and metonymy in the conception of emotion in different cultures

That is, communication is sending objects from one container to another along a conduit. The mind and the person are both containers, meanings and experiences are both objects, and com- munication and sharing both involve the transfer of objects from one container to another. Someone you can tell your innermost thoughts to, someone you can share feelings with. Experience OB- JECTS meanings are transferred from one container to another with the result that both containers have the same experience objects. There are no facades, no masks. It is, of course, no accident that this particular mapping is most relevant to friendship.

If it is open, we can look inside, and the more we open it the more we can see. We can see the content that we could not see before it was open, that is, the truth, the real self. It is this real self that becomes shared by means of communication between friends. Given that friend- ship appears to involve a large amount of communication between friends as a major property, this leads to a further metaphor: What we found in this section is that the American conception of friendship is constituted to a considerable extent by the notion of com- munication.

This has the effect that friendship is understood to a large degree in terms of the conventionalized metaphors for communication and its subcomponents, such as people and their experiences. Friend- ship assumes all the major metaphors for communication, people, and experiences: On the basis of the linguistic evidence presented in this section, the general conclusion that can be drawn is that communication between two friends is a prominent property of American friendship.

Given this, it is not surprising that metaphors that are conventionally asso- ciated with communication in general will apply to friendship and will be prevalent in the way Americans talk about friendship. It is mentioned as a peripheral emotion word in a study by, for example, Storm and Storm , but it is not men- tioned as an emotion word in similar studies, such as those by Fehr and Russell and Shaver et al. Respect is a third such concept, but it did not appear in a metaphorically elaborated form in the data.

Now, since friendship is linked with these two emotion concepts, it will also have the metaphors that intimacy and affection are generally associated with. We can begin with intimacy in friendship. It was mentioned in the section on communication that sharing leads to more intimacy. Emotions and Relationships 93 The other emotion concept that friendship involves for many Amer- icans is affection.

This manifested itself in examples like the following: Emotions in general are often conceptualized as temperature see chapter 4. Thus, the conception of friendship relies partly on emo- tion metaphors. States in general are metaphorical objects. Furthermore, the state is an attributed state; we attribute friendship to others and our- selves. Attributed states are metaphorically viewed as possessed ob- jects Lakoff, Friendship as a Possessed Object Friendship is often conceptualized as a possessed object, as the follow- ing examples show: Julie and I carry our friendship through our correspondence.

The loss of friendship is like a little part of you dying off. People who have trouble mak- ing friends have a hard time keeping friendship. The examples assume the following mappings: Attributes in general are commonly conceptualized as objects and the existence or nonexist- ence of attributes as objects that are possessed, lost, kept, et cetera see Lakoff, Attributes include physical, emotional, social, and so forth, states and relationships. Here are some examples: Friendship as a Bond Attributed states are a special case of states, and attributed states in- clude relationships.

Emotions and Relationships 95 A real friendship starts with a thread and spins into a rope. The mappings are as follows: Thus the meta- phor focuses on the enduring nature of the relationship. Moreover, relation- ships in general are viewed as connections, links, ties, bonds, and so forth. In general, a very strong bond corresponds to a very stable relation- ship that the participants see as being lasting or permanent. Friendship as an Economic Exchange If two entities are in a relationship, they can interact. In friendship, the two friends are related and they do interact in many ways commu- nicatively, emotionally, behaviorally, etc.

Several examples suggest that people think of friendship as an interaction between two people. They can be accounted for by the following correspondences between the source domain of an economic exchange and the target domain of interaction in the friendship: Economic exchanges are reciprocal. Friendship relationships are reciprocal. All friendships are rooted in reciprocity. Friendship is a give and take relationship. Economic exchanges are typically based on equality. Friendship relationships are typically based on equality. Being reciprocal is good in a friendship.

For example, moral interactions are also viewed as economic exchanges see Johnson, Every time we talk about our emotions, we use images, especially metaphors and metonymies. Thus, the quality of timelessness stresses the importance of this way of reference to emotions. It would be useful to find out if they are also universal regarding culture. If emotions were conceptualized in the same images in cultures that completely differ from each other, there would be an evidence for the universality of metaphors and metonymies in the conceptualization of human emotions. The question of culture-specification includes, additionally to the question if the images in which basic emotions are referred to are universal, also the question whether something like basic emotions exists in general, and is discussed intensively.

Except of the meaning of metaphor and metonymy in general and in reference to human emotions, the question of culture-specification will be discussed in this paper. We will have a look at the opponents and supporters of the theory of universality of emotions and emotion images and find out whether they really exclude each other or if one can find a hypothesis that considers both points of view.

In contrast to the conscious use of metaphor and metonymy in literature and rhetoric, the process of referring to our emotions in images is a completely unconscious one.

George Lakoff assumes a link between these images and human physiology, what consequently means non-arbitrariness and therefore universality of emotion metaphors and metonymies in all languages Mikolajczuk The question of this universality will be observed after finding out the general meaning of metaphor and metonymy, also in emotions. The reason for that is that the regular use over years through the history of a language integrates a specific metaphor into standard vocabulary. Such metaphors are called conventional or lexicalized metaphors.

The process of taking a word and giving it a completely new sense is well illustrated by the model of source and target domain. Business economics - Economic and Social History. Amerikanistik - Kultur und Landeskunde. Englisch - Grammatik, Stil, Arbeitstechnik. GRIN Publishing, located in Munich, Germany, has specialized since its foundation in in the publication of academic ebooks and books. The publishing website GRIN. Free Publication of your term paper, essay, interpretation, bachelor's thesis, master's thesis, dissertation or textbook - upload now!

Register or log in. Our newsletter keeps you up to date with all new papers in your subjects. Request a new password via email. Table of Contents 1. Introduction Every time we talk about our emotions, we use images, especially metaphors and metonymies. Marketing Across Different Cultures.

• Theorie der metaphysischen Erkenntnis - Wie Metaphysik als Wissenschaft möglich ist- (German Edition)
• Portrait of Marcia Ball
• Dominique
• The Girl in the Mirror
• The Big Otter
• Ballerina Weather Girl (Not-So-Ordinary Girl)
• Pain-Relieving Procedures: The Illustrated Guide