2002. MIND-AS-BODY as a Cross-linguistic Conceptual Metaphor (original) (raw)
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Metaphor and Emotion - Language Culture and Body in Human Feeling
Are human emotions best characterized as biological, psychological, or cultural entities? Many researchers claim that emotions arise either from human biology (i.e., biological reductionism) or as products of culture (i.e., social constructionism). This book challenges this simplistic division between the body and culture by showing how human emotions are to a large extent ''constructed'' from individuals' embodied experiences in different cultural settings. Zoltán Kö vecses illustrates through detailed crosslinguistic analyses how many emotion concepts reflect widespread metaphorical patterns of thought. These emotion metaphors arise from recurring embodied experiences, one reason why human emotions across many cultures conform to certain basic biological-physiological processes in the human body and of the body interacting with the external world. Moreover, there are different cultural models for emotions that arise from unique patterns of both metaphorical and metonymic thinking in varying cultural contexts. The view proposed here demonstrates how cultural aspects of emotions, metaphorical language about the emotions, and human physiology in emotion are all part of an integrated system. Kö vecses convincingly shows how this integrated system points to the reconciliation of the seemingly contradictory views of biological reductionism and social constructionism in contemporary debates about human emotion.
By affirming that mind and body exist in different domains of knowledge as discriminations acted by an observer, Constructivism has overcome the old dualism typical of psychosomatic medicine, that traditionally considers mind and body as two separated entities. However, both in everyday life and in clinical work, we often stumble upon our own language that, being intrinsically dualistic, does not seem to allow the epistemological "leap" and instead leads us back into the old dichotomy. This is an important issue particularly during a psychotherapy with a person who suffers from so called "psychosomatic symptoms". Indeed, according to Kelly, in this case the aim of the therapy is to help the patient to subsume their rigid mind-body dualism. But how can it be done, if language does not support us? Through a case study, this paper suggests that the use of metaphorical language allows us to "construct a bridge" between mind and body, in order to give the suffering a new meaning.
Journal of Pragmatics, 1996
I discuss the metaphorically-rooted psychological lexicon of Japanese in order to demonstrate the experiential and embodied aspect of mentation. Before examining the Japanese psychological lexicon, I offer a broad theoretical framework by introducing some deeply rooted philosophical assumptions that have governed our theorizings about the relations between the 'inside'/'outside' worlds, mind/body, and mental representation/linguistic expression. Then, I introduce what I believe is a useful response to dualistic conceptualizations by introducing Lakoff's ideas about the fundamental role of metaphor and the 'embodied' nature of cognition. His ideas may be interpreted as an attempt to dismantle the misleading dualisms that have caused philosophers, psychologists, and linguists so much theoretical trouble. Next, I distinguish between what I call literal and figurative metaphors and discuss the bodily basis of linguistic metaphors of mind. Then, after discussing the tropic strategies universally employed to discuss mental events, I turn to examples from the psychological lexicon of Japanese to make my case. Finally, I examine additional evidence about the tropic nature of psychological experience by briefly examining the metaphoric shifts of meaning in Japanese onomatopoeia. "If we could trace them to their sources, we should find, in all languages, the names for things that fall not under our senses to have had their first rise from sensible ideas."
International Journal of Cognitive Linguistics, 2014
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-à-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.
Consciousness and Common-Sense Metaphors of Mind
Two Sciences of Mind, 1997
The science of the mind, and of consciousness in particular, needs to carefully consider people's common-sense views of the mind, not just what the mind really is. Such views are themselves an aspect of the nature of (conscious) mind, and therefore part of the object of study for a science of mind. Also, since the common-sense views allow broadly successful social interaction, it is reasonable to look to the common-sense views for some rough guidance as to the real nature of the mind. On the other hand, to the extent that common-sense views are inaccurate, and perhaps even in gross con ict with the true nature of the mind, one interesting scienti c question is: why do we hold such views, given our access to our own minds? Why should introspection be limited in a way that allows inaccurate views to hold sway? Now, common-sense views of the mind are revealed in natural language discourse that describes mental states, and such descriptions are largely metaphorical. The metaphors are used within thinking about the mind as well as in language. Therefore the study of metaphor is central to the study of mind. The present article is a preliminary study of the importance of metaphor in the scienti c study of consciousness. It concentrates on analyzing the nature of a range of important metaphors of mind, brie y discussing the extent to which they can be used to describe or qualify states of consciousness, and pointing to important questions about the nature of consciousness that the study of the metaphors raises. The article further conjectures that the reason people use metaphors in describing themselves is often not (just) that they have intellectually worked out some structural analogy | e.g., between interactions of physical objects in physical space and interactions of ideas in the mind | but rather that they feel their own minds to be as described by the metaphor | e.g., they feel that the ideas in their minds are interacting physical entities. This matter of how a mind feels to itself is an aspect of the central issue of consciousness, namely its phenomenal quality.
Internal States: From Headache to Anger. Conceptualization and Semantic Mastery
2017
Here we ask if we can also apply the distinction between referential and inferential competence we introduced in Chap. 3 to words that do not refer to things that are perceived using the external senses, especially to words/concepts that denote bodily experiences (such as pain, thirst, hunger, etc.) or emotions. We introduce and discuss the hypothesis that—even though such words/concepts do not refer to intersubjectively identifiable entities in the external world—they do have a kind of referent that can be accessed via direct perception, more specifically ‘proprioception’, as we have defined it in terms of all propriosensitive information we can consciously access. In the first part of the chapter, we specifically consider terms denoting bodily experiences such as ‘pain’ or ‘hunger’ and argue that their referents are identified and classified from a first-personal point of view on the basis of four main characteristics: their specific intensity, their localization in the body, thei...
The Sweet Smell of Red-An Interplay of Synaesthesia and Metaphor in Language
The human senses are not only important to us in our daily interaction with the world but also in our daily communication. We rely so heavily on them that we do not notice how often we fall back on them when we talk. Not only do we use them in their literal version-which we might think would be the most common usage-we also use them metaphorically. Sometimes the metaphorical usage of a sense is even more frequent than its literal usage and which can even mean that a sense is used almost exclusively in its metaphorical form. These metaphors can occur in two versions: strong and weak synaesthetic. The first form has a sense related term in the target as well as the source domain, while the weak version only has such a term in the source domain. This paper is concerned with the occurrence of sense-related terms and their behavior in language. It will investigate how the adjectives that I consider the best representation for each sense occur in English and German, if they differ in thei...