Metaphors of Anger, Pride and Love: A Lexical Approach to the Structure of Concepts

154 Pages·1986·13.65 MB·English

by  Zoltán Kövecses

METAPHORS OF ANGER, PRIDE, AND LOVE
Pragmatics & Beyond
An Interdisciplinary Series of Language Studies
Editors:
Herman Parret
(Belgian National Science Foundation,
Universities of Louvain and Antwerp)
Jef Verschueren
(Belgian National Science Foundation,
University of Antwerp)
Editorial Address:
Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures
University of Antwerp (UIA)
Universiteitsplein 1
B-2610 Wilrijk
Belgium
Editorial Board:
Norbert Dittmar (Free University of Berlin)
David Holdcroft (University of Leeds)
Jacob Mey (Odense University)
Jerrold M. Sadock (University of Chicago)
Emanuel A. Schegloff (University of California at Los Angeles)
Daniel Vanderveken (University of Quebec at Trois-Rivières)
Teun A. van Dij (University of Amsterdam)
VII:8
Zoltán Kövecses
Metaphors of Anger, Pride, and Love:
A Lexical Approach to the Structure of Concepts
METAPHORS OF
ANGER, PRIDE, AND LOVE
A LEXICAL APPROACH TO THE
STRUCTURE OF CONCEPTS
Zoltán Kövecses
L. Eötvös University
JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY
AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA
1986
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Kövecses, Zoltán.
Metaphors of anger, pride, and love.
(Pragmatics & beyond, ISSN 0166-6258; VII:8)
Bibliography: p.
I. Metaphor. 2. Semantics. 3. Concepts. 4. Anger. 5. Pride and vanity. 6. Love. I. Title.
II. Series.
P301.5.M48K68 1986 40Γ.9 87-15788
ISBN 90 272 2558 3 (European) / ISBN 1-55619-009-3 (US) (alk. paper)
© Copyright 1986 - John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or
any other means, without written permission from the publisher.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vii
1. GOALS AND METHODS 1
2. THE CONCEPT OF ANGER 11
2.1. Some questions 11
2.2. Metaphor and metonymy 12
2.3. The other principal metaphors 20
2.4. Some minor metaphors 27
2.5. The prototype scenario 28
2.6. Restatement of the prototypical scenario 31
2.7. The non-prototypical cases 32
2.8. Conclusions 36
3. THE CONCEPT OF PRIDE 39
3.1. Some additional issues 39
3.2. Some metonymies for pride 40
3.3. Some metaphors 43
3.4. Causes of pride 44
3.5. Scales, related concepts and the prototype 46
3.6. Self-esteem 49
3.7. Conceit 53
3.8. Vanity 56
3.9. Conclusion 59
4. THE CONCEPT OF ROMANTIC LOVE 61
4.1. Some further aspects of a concept 61
4.2. The central metaphor 62
4.3. The object of love 67
4.4. Related concepts 74
VI CONTENTS
4.5. Intensity 82
4.6. Passivity, lack of control, pleasantness 88
4.7. The ideal model 93
4.8. Towards the typical model 96
4.9. The typical model 103
5. IMPLICATIONS FOR THEORIES OF CONCEPTUAL
STRUCTURE 107
5.1. The structure of a concept 107
5.2. Metaphorical aspects of concepts 115
6. IMPLICATIONS FOR THEORIES OF LEXICAL
STRUCTURE 121
6.1. Polysemy 121
6.2. Collocation 129
6.3. Semantic fields 136
REFERENCES 145
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The work presented here was conceived during a stay at the Linguistics
Department of the University of California, Berkeley, and was inspired in
particular by interactions with Wallace Chafe, Charles Fillmore, Paul Kay,
George Lakoff, Karl Zimmer, and others. I am greatly indebted to all of
them.
Thanks are also due to Ferenc Kiefer and Jef Verschueren for their crit­
ical comments on earlier versions of this work.
Finally, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the two persons
who have helped me the most and in more than one way: George Lakoff and
László T. András.
Chapter 2, THE CONCEPT OF ANGER, was written jointly with
George Lakoff and is a slightly revised version of the paper that appeared in
the Berkeley Cognitive Science Report Series in May, 1983, under the title
The cognitive model of anger inherent in American English. A revised version
of this paper also appeared in D. Holland andN. Quinn (eds.), Cultural mod­
els in language and thought (published by Cambridge University Press) and in
George Lakoff, Women, fire, and dangerous things: What categories reveal
about the mind (The University of Chicago Press, 1987).
1. GOALS AND METHODS
This study is an attempt to give an account of the structure of some
abstract concepts as these structures are accessible through the study of the
language we use to talk about the concepts. The concepts that I shall investi
gate are 'anger', 'pride' and 'love'. Since lexical meaning is inextricably
bound up with concepts, the case studies to be presented (in chapters 2
through 4) will not only have implications for theories of conceptual structure
(see chapter 5) but also for theories of lexical structure (see chapter 6). The
force of my proposals is considerably weakened by the fact that the language
materials on which they are based involve only three concepts. Much more
research would be necessary to justify my claims.
On the lexical semantic side, let it suffice — for the time being — to say
that my investigations will not allow for a strict separation between sense and
reference and, if the distinction can be handled at all, certainly not for a
restriction of my approach to sense alone.
Since it would be impossible to have deep interviews with every member
of a speech community in the search for the structure of particular concepts
associated with particular aspects of the world, we have to resort to a more
practicable method. Although we cannot interview everyone, we can probe
the language used by everyone. Since the goal is to get at our conceptual sys
tem, and the folk models within this system, through the lexicon of the Eng
lish language, we can call such a method a 'lexical approach' (cf. Ver-
schueren 1985). The various folk models corresponding to various areas of
experience can in turn be called 'language-based' folk models.
This lexical approach to our conceptual system can be regarded as a con
tinuation of some respectable traditions in the study of cognitive systems.
One tradition I have in mind is what is called 'linguistic analysis' as rep
resented in the works of Wittgenstein (1963), Austin (1961), Ryle (1949) and
others. These philosophers use ordinary language for discovering subtle con
ceptual distinctions among such philosophically interesting categories as 'ac
tion', 'meaning', 'mind', 'emotion', etc. The other tradition comes from
ethnography and anthropology. Etnographers and anthropologists who are
2 METAPHORS OF ANGER, PRIDE, AND LOVE
interested in the cognitive systems of various peoples look at language as an
important tool in the job of learning about these cognitive systems. Resear
chers in this area owe a great deal to the pioneering work of Sapir (1949) and
Whorf (1956). One of the most influential recent advocates of this methodol
ogy, Charles Frake, sees the role of language in this connection in the follow
ing way:
"The analysis of a culture's terminological systems will not, of course,
exhaustively reveal the cognitive world of its members, but it will certainly
tap a central portion of it. Culturally significant cognitive features must be
communicable between persons in one of the standard symbolic systems of
the culture. A major share of these features will undoubtedly be codable in
a society's most flexible and productive communicative device, its language"
(in Dil(ed.)1980:3).
Similarly, my assumption in this study will be that it is possible to uncover a
portion of our conceptual system by studying the way we talk about various
aspects of the world. However, there are also some major differences
between these traditions and the methodology that I am proposing.
One point of divergence concerns the goals that the methods are aimed
at. In the philosophical and anthropological approaches mentioned above the
goal of researchers is to discover the most important conceptual distinctions
that are coded into the language (especially into its vocabulary). That is,
these researchers are searching for the main dimensions along which concepts
can be shown to differ from each other. By contrast, my main emphasis will
be on how a single concept, like 'anger", 'pride' or 'love', is structured inter
nally. In short, while the main aim of the former approaches is to point out
conceptual differences between items, my focus of interest is on the concep
tual organization of a single item. This does not mean, however, that the lex
ical approach I am working with does not lead to some interesting 'inter-item'
issues. It does, as will become obvious when such issues as 'related concepts',
collocations and semantic fields are discussed. But the main emphasis is on
'intra-item' structure. It seems to me that it is this difference in emphasis that
is mainly responsible for the, at least for me, impoverished view of meaning
as predominantly sense. Concentrating on differences between items results
in a skeleton of meaning for an item. On the other hand, I would like to believe
that if we focus on the detailed internal structure of an item the conceptual
features responsible for the differences will fall out as well and will do so in a
natural way.
Another difference between the approaches is closely related to the first.
GOALS AND METHODS 3
In accordance with their goals as given above the philosophers and
anthropologists in question try to find those conceptual dimensions that pro
vide systematic (preferably binary) contrasts that apply to a large portion of
the lexicon. The lexical approach as conceived of in the present study does
not seek such systematic contrasts. When it is proposed, for example, that the
feature 'Self views himself or herself as forming a unity with the beloved',
which characterizes love, is a part of the conceptual model of love, it is not
expected that this feature has a (binary or any other kind of) counterpart and
that it will show up in some other items in the lexicon. The idea of contrast is
simply irrelevant here. Nevertheless, as we shall see, these non-systematic
features play just as important a role as systematic sense components in the
explanation of certain semantic phenomena.
Finally, the philosophical and anthropological approaches are deficient
in an important respect. This is the fact that they do not seem to recognize the
special relevance of metomomy, metaphor and what will be termed 'related
concepts' to the make-up of some concepts. I do not wish to claim that these
are all relevant to each concept or that they are relevant to the same degree,
but I certainly wish to claim that the analysis of a large number of concepts
would be deficient without taking at least some of them into account. Since
the notion of metaphor as employed here has special significance in this con
nection, I will say more about it in this chapter.
One reflection of our conceptual system is language. Thus the examina
tion of the linguistic expressions that have to do with anger, pride and love
promises some success in the study of the conceptual model of anger, pride
and love. Since I am primarily concerned with the everyday conception of
anger, pride and love, — as opposed to scientific and artistic conceptions —
, I wish to concentrate on what might be viewed as everyday linguistic expres
sions. The material on which this study is based is composed of those linguis
tic expressions that are commonly used by and are familiar to most, if not all,
native speakers of English, that is, those expressions that do not belong to the
sphere of either scientific or artistic discourse. As a result, the expressions we
will be looking at will often be well-worn, clichéd or even hackneyed. How
ever, this need not worry us in the least, since our goal is to 'dig up', or make
explicit our most everyday conception of anger, pride and love. I will be refer
ring to expressions of this kind as conventionalized (or "standardized", as
Frake puts it (Dil, (ed.) 1980: 4)) linguistic expressions. Thus a twofold dis
tinction is intended. First, I would like to draw a distinction between conven
tionalized language and conventional language. In a sense, most expressions