Metaphor and Emotion

This book challenges the 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. Kovecses illustrates through detailed cross-linguistic analyses how many emotion concepts reflect wide-spread 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. 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. Kovecses 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.

• Offers a unique synthesis of social constructionism, cognitive semantics, and the physiology of emotion • Deals with the issue of the universality and culture-specificity of emotion within a unified framework • Shows how the study of metaphor can contribute to an understanding of human conceptual systems

1. Language and emotion concepts; 2. Metaphor of emotion; 3. Emotion metaphors: are they unique to the emotions?; 4. Events and emotions: the subcategorization of emotions; 5. The force of emotion; 6. Emotions and relationships; 7. Folk versus expert theories of emotion; 8. Universality in the conceptualization of emotion; 9. Cultural variation in the conceptualization of emotion; 10. Emotion language: a new synthesis.

‘I deem Metaphor and Emotion to be a substantial work … I believe that any literary-linguistic scholar interested in cognition, emotion or metaphor will find this work hugely rewarding.’ Language and Literature

‘Metaphor and Emotion contains much that is interesting, even intriguing … Though the book\'s emphasis is firmly on linguistic analysis, Metaphor and Emotion will also be rewarding and suggestive for philosophers, psychologists and anyone eager to look in more detail at the relative place of language, body and culture in the constitution of human emotions.’ Philosophical Writings

\'… an informative, readable and at times entertaining overview of metaphor and culture.\' The Psychologist