Metaphor and Emotion: Language, Culture, and Body in Human Feeling. Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction Second Series

Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction

by Zoltan Kovecses

This book challenges the simplistic division between the body and culture by showing how human emotions are to a large extent 'constructed' from individuals' embodied experiences in different cultural settings. Kovecses illustrates through detailed cross-linguistic analyses how many emotion concepts reflect wide-spread metaphorical patterns of thought. These emotion metaphors arise from recurring embodied experiences, one reason why human emotions across many cultures conform to certain basic biological-physiological processes in the human body and of the body interacting with the external world. The view proposed here demonstrates how cultural aspects of emotions, metaphorical language about the emotions, and human physiology in emotion are all part of an integrated system. Kovecses convincingly shows how this integrated system points to the reconciliation of the seemingly contradictory views of biological reductionism and social constructionism in contemporary debates about human emotion.

Genres: Linguistics, Psychology

242 pages, ebook

First published June 7, 1996

About the author

Zoltán Kövecses

Reviews

[Tissuereligion · Rating 4 out of 5]

1. Trying to find out how a particular variable varies across different populations.

2. Break down the variable into components that you are reasonably confident that the analysis of will yield a sufficiently powerful answer. Insert analyses of metaphors and what they say about the underlying conceptual framework.

3. Analyze results.

4. Profit.