Emotive metaphors in professional jargons

Abstract

The work investigates semantic structure and features of nominations of emotion fear – emotives – in professional and social jargons. Military and navy jargons are found to be productive. The research was performed in four stages. Stage one reveals that fear is primarily manifested through secondary emotions. At the second stage it is determined that the number of descriptive emotives, as opposed to direct ones, prevails. The lexico-semantic group ‘Fear’ is proved to comprise four subgroups of descriptive emotives, namely, ‘emotion’, ‘person in a state of emotion’, ‘personal actions in a state of emotion’, and ‘causation of emotional state’. The dominant nominations constitute subgroup two – ‘person in a state of emotion’, whereas ‘emotion’ and ‘personal actions’ are poorly nominated by the emotives in question. Stage III proves emotives to follow four metaphorical models formed according to mapping of source and target domains. In particular, person in a state of emotion is rather compared with personal actions than with a disease. Models resting on comparisons with artifacts and nature are also determined. Stage IV implied comparison of the obtained results. Applied complex methodology and research stages provide detailed study. The study shows that in linguistics ‘fear’ is a person-oriented lexico-semantic group with core nominations of a person in professional and social jargons.