Metaphor and Emotion
Language, Culture, and Body in Human Feeling

How human emotions are 'constructed' from individuals' embodied experiences in different cultural settings.

Zoltán Kövecses (Author)

9780521641630, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 February 2000

242 pages
23.6 x 16.1 x 2.2 cm, 0.53 kg

'… an informative, readable and at times entertaining overview of metaphor and culture.' The Psychologist

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.

1. Language and emotion concepts
2. Metaphor of emotion
3. Emotion metaphors: are they unique to the emotions?
4. Events and emotions: the subcategorization of emotions
5. The force of emotion
6. Emotions and relationships
7. Folk versus expert theories of emotion
8. Universality in the conceptualization of emotion
9. Cultural variation in the conceptualization of emotion
10. Emotion language: a new synthesis.

Subject Areas: Psychology [JM], Psycholinguistics [CFD]