نشریه پژوهشهای زبانشناسی (Apr 2020)
A book review: Metaphor and Emotion: Language, Culture, and Body in Human Feeling, by Zoltan Kövecses
Abstract
Abstract After the publication of the influential book The Metaphors We Live By, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in 1980, many thinkers have started studying the conceptual metaphor’s various dimensions besides how it affects thinking and everyday life. In the meantime, Zoltan Kovecses is one of the researchers with a great deal of research in this field, also providing the scientific community with valuable works in the area of cognitive linguistics and metaphor. Published by the University of Cambridge, England in 2000, the book Metaphor and Emotion: Language, Culture and Body in Human Feelings is one of these works. In the present paper, it has been tried to introduce this work in its best possible way so that the interested reader may gain a general image of what Kovecses has been seeking and has dealt with in this book. Introduction What is emotion and how is it created? From one viewpoint, emotion may be described as a general, short response to an unexpected reality associated with a pleasant or unpleasant emotional state. Since emotion and the emergence of its manifestations, i.e., behavior, are in close relationship with culture and social customs, this issue has gained a special place in different branches of humanities and behavioral sciences as well as social sciences. Emotion indeed contains responses rooted in our brain’s innermost and oldest part, called the brainstem. Millions of years later, over the evolution era, the thinking brain, or new cortex of the brain, i.e., the large cortex made up of complex tissues making the upper layers of the brain appeared from these emotional root parts. This fact, the origination of the thinking brain from the emotional brain, and that the emotional brain had existed long before the logical brain, makes the association between thought and feeling clearer. Hence, it seems that emotions may play a key role in how we think and behave. The emotions we experience every day may propel to make big and small decisions in life. Emotions indeed appear in human being for a variety of reasons; sometimes they are transient, created in response to something simple, and sometimes they are stable, resilient, and even life-changing. They may make an incentive in us to act in certain ways and provide us with the tools required to interact in our complex social world. Discussion Given the significance and role of emotions in the lives of living creatures, various sciences have addressed them from various perspectives. The cognitive-linguistic approach to emotion is one of these perspectives, receiving more attention after the advent of Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) conceptual metaphor theory. Zoltan Kovecses is a researcher looking at this issue from the viewpoint of cognitive linguistics and in the book Metaphor and Emotion, seeking to illustrate how people talk about emotions and how they think about them. In this path, Kovecses addresses various issues directly or indirectly helping him reach an answer to the abovementioned questions in order for him to be able to create a new understandable image of emotion and how to conceptualize it. To answer these questions, Kovecses initially tries to define the language of emotion. Although dividing the words of emotion into two categories besides expressing various perspectives about emotion, then providing a clear image of those two word categories, it is not seemed that he has succeeded to arrive at a comprehensive definition of emotion. Throughout this path, the critical reader is constantly faced with the question of what is emotion in itself, and what are the criteria for distinguishing it from other human features? Is it originally special to human at all? In this book, this concept has been taken for granted and there is nowhere a specific definition for it, making it impossible to simply find and consider the various types of emotion for further reflection. Kovecses continues to investigate the intercultural category of emotion conceptualization, also creating one of the most interesting parts of his book, since although the analysis of concepts in a specific language owns its special value, only by generalizing it, we can claim that a science has been made and a new theory has been developed (Goldstein & Goldstein, 1984). Conclusion The book Metaphor and Emotion is a book that may be addressed from several dimensions; accordingly, it can be useful in the study of various fields. Although Kovecses has addressed emotion from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, just as cognitive linguistics studies have affected other areas like neuroscience, sociological, philosophical, linguistic studies, etc. this review may also make a difference in the field of emotion and its related concepts. Moreover, an accurate and deep understanding of what expressed by Kovecses about the conceptual metaphors of emotion necessitates a right understanding of the metaphor concept in the cognitive linguistics field as well as metaphorical thinking and its key role in human mental processes. Nevertheless, even without this background, this book may open new horizons before the eyes of the interested reader.
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