Many researchers claim that emotions arise either from human biology (i.e., biological reductionism) or as products of culture (i.e., social constructionism). Are human emotions best characterized as biological, psychological, or cultural entities? Zoltan Kovecses demonstrates how cultural aspects, metaphorical language, and human physiology are part of an integrated system. This book challenges the simplistic division between the body and culture by stressing how human emotions are to a large extent “constructed” from individuals’ embodied experiences in different cultural settings. Hb ISBN (2000): 0-521-64163-2
Customer Reviews
Interesting Thinking:
Kovecses organizes the current thinking about metaphor and emotion well. -Metaphors that spring from the body being at the core of our emotional thought. I would recommend this to anyone interested in language, emotions, or metaphorical thinking. -It catches the overlap in needed fashion.
Metaphor - the Cultural Connection:
Zoltán Kövecses, coauthor of the case study on anger metaphors in English in Geoge Lakoff’s Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, has spent almost two decades studying the ways we use to talk about the emotions (mostly using English examples) and has been one of the most prolific researchers in applying Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptual metaphor approach to the domain of emotional experience. Although it has been 25 years since L & J’s Metaphors We Live By was published, the amount of research on metaphor in other languages - especially non-Indo-European ones, has been quite small. It is refreshing, then, to see that Kövecses has taken a serious stab at dealing with the issues arising from some of the more important cross-cultural research done so far on emotion metaphor.
So, why would a cognitive linguist be interested in emotions? K. attempts an explanation in the preface. Here K. takes issue with the views of neurobiologist Joseph LeDoux. LeDoux sees “conscious feelings” as being of secondary importance. Understandably perhaps, emotions for a neurobiologist are primarily about brain states and bodily responses. K., however, feels that the secondary role given to conscious feelings by LeDoux stems from his use of an “unsatisfactory kind of linguistics” that sees words as refering literally to preexisting emotional states. One of K.’s main goals is to show how Cognitive Linguistics can give a deeper insight into the relationship between emotion and emotion language. A CL approach, in emphasizing the figurative side of human language, reveals how language is used to define and, at times, create emotional experience.
In this book, K. focusses on three main questions:
1. How do we talk about emotions in English and other languages?
2. What folk theories underly these ways of talking?
3. What is the relationship between folk and scientific theories?
Ch. 1 examines the role of figurative language in the conceptualization of emotion. K. asks “Do metaphors simply reflect a preexisting, literal reality, or do they actually create or constitute our emotional reality?” Why “boiling with anger”, “be madly in love” etc? What exactly are “emotions”?
Ch. 2 summarizes the research (much of it is his own) on English emotion concepts and identifies a limited number of source domains. Ch. 3 is concerned with whether or not these metaphorical source domains are unique to the emotions.
Ch. 4 looks at the Event Structure of emotions - STATES ARE LOCATIONS, CHANGES ARE MOVEMENTS etc., while Ch. 5 applies Len Talmy’s Force Dynamics to emotion.
Ch. 6 contrasts emotions and relationships. The former are conceptualized in terms of a master metaphor EMOTION IS FORCE and the latter are organized around a complex systems metaphor.
Ch. 7 deals with the relationship between folk and expert theories of emotion, while Ch. 8 and 9 look at universality and cultural variation. The final chapter attempts to reconcile a CL approach and a Social Constructionist approach to the meaning of emotion.
I personally found the last three chapters the most interesting - since, as far as I know, there has been little published in book form on the cultural aspects of metaphor. CL can obviously learn a lot from Anthropology - indeed it has to, if it wants to strengthen its claims about the embodiment of meaning and universals. K. uses examples from Chinese based on Brian King’s unpublished doctoral dissertation on Chinese Emotion Concepts (which I found online as a downloadable pdf), Catherine Lutz’s published fieldword on Ifaluk and a number of other sources. The cultural dimensions in particular make this book a fascinating one for anybody interested in the issues surrounding the universality and relativity of the human conceptual system.
