Metaphors of Sadness in Quotations

Abstract

The paper studies metaphors used in common people’s passages about sadness on the internet site www.searchquotes.com/search/Sadness. The paper also investigates which sadness metaphors listed in Kövecses (2000) and Esenova (2011) are applied in sadness quotations on the site and finds only a small number of them. However, the quotations instantiate a number of other metaphors not listed by the two authors. The difference may be explained by the fact that linguistic expressions in Kövecses’s and Esenova’s corpora describe what people feel when they say they are sad, whereas sadness quotations present what people understand by the concept of sadness.