Emotion and the Body: A Corpus-Based Investigation of Metaphorical Containers of ANGER across Languages

摘要

This paper investigates the embodied conceptualization of emotions from a cognitive linguistic perspective, focusing on the metaphorical construal of the body and its parts as containers for various types of anger in English, Russian, and Spanish. Based on the statistical analysis of twenty thousand metaphorical uses of anger words from representative corpora, our results provide empirical support to the embodied cultural prototype view, according to which emotion conceptualization derives from both universal bodily experiences and more specific socio-cultural constructs. On the one hand, we observe a similar high salience in the three languages of the BODY IS A CONTAINER FOR ANGER metaphor, as well as cross-lingual agreement in preferring individual body parts as metaphorical containers for some specific types of anger. On the other hand, our findings highlight several areas of cross-lingual variation. These concern differences in the dominant localizations of the emotion, culture-mediated variation in its expression, and different granularity in the elaboration of the body-emotion relationship. All these features are highly interpretable vis-a-vis relevant research on emotion in other disciplines. To conclude, we discuss the relevance of our findings for future studies across a broader range of disciplines in the study of human affect.