Exploring diachronic salience of emotion metaphors

Abstract

This paper analyzes metaphorical conceptualizations of happiness in the historical corpus of Classical Malay and in the corpus of present-day Indonesian, the national variety of Malay used in Indonesia. The aim is to explore the idea of diachronic salience and universal/variation in metaphorical conceptualizations between diachronic varieties of the same language. Token and type frequencies are used as measures of salience of the metaphors. Seven of the top-10 metaphors in Classical Malay with high token and type frequencies also make into the top-10 metaphors ranked by these measures in Indonesian, suggesting a relatively stable diachronic salience of the metaphoric cognitive models of happiness in these two Malay varieties. The shared metaphors are parts of larger networks of semantic domains, namely possession , location , motion , containment , and quantity . The metaphors are discussed in relation to themes reported in earlier cross-cultural psychological studies of the cultural folk models of happiness .