The Role of Metaphor in the Structuring of Emotion Concepts

Abstract

Conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) is one of the most prolific frameworks in the study of emotion concepts. Following the seminal work of Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and subsequent work by Kövecses (1986, 1990) and Kövecses and Lakoff (1987), an impressive number of studies in cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics have sought to document and confirm the claim that conceptual metaphor (CM) structures affective concepts. I attempt a brief overview of CMT claims about and CMT-inspired research on emotion concepts. I continue by presenting a study based on data collected in six languages, to assess the role of CM in the structuring of emotion concepts. I introduce the procedure, the corpus, and the analyses that have been carried out, including a detailed discussion of the considerations that informed the coding decisions applied to the corpus in a tentative quantitative analysis. Finally, I highlight a series of difficulties and controversies raised by CMT-driven analysis of emotion concepts that could be employed in hypothesis-driven experiments to test conceptual processing claims made within CMT.