Emotion as a Huge Mass of Moving Water

Abstract

This article is an attempt to clarify the attributes of emotion prototype and to identify specific emotions close to the prototype, discussing the significance of each source domain, or the lack thereof, on the metaphorical understanding of various types of emotion. It first provides a brief review of the studies on emotion metaphors by Kövecses, and then proposes an alternative to his idea about the prototype of emotion through analyses of a number of citations of conventional metaphors, containing both source and target-domain lexemes, retrieved from the British National Corpus. The corpus study reveals that the prevalent source domain in conventional metaphors for emotion is “A HUGE MASS OF MOVING WATER IN THE NATURAL WORLD,” and the specific emotions close to the emotion prototype are ANXIETY, RELIEF, DESIRE, and PLEASURE. The results are different from and probably incompatible with the view formed by the introspective method adopted in traditional studies of metaphor that utilized a cognitive linguistic point of view.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work is supported in part by a Grant‐in‐Aid for Scientific Research from Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Grant Number 19520422. I would like to thank Raymond W. Gibbs Jr., Hideki Watanabe and Trane DeVore for their invaluable comments and criticisms on the earlier versions of this paper.

Notes

¹ Cruse (1986) and Deignan (2005) mention conventional metaphors that have a structure that includes a slot where target-domain words are filled. Cruse points out that the meaning of the word “mouth” in phrases like “the mouth of the river” or “the mouth of the bottle” is highly context-bound: It is delivered by metaphorical interpretation. However, an unmodified use of the word “mouth,” as in “At school, we are doing a project on mouths,” is unlikely to be interpreted as a metaphor. Deignan presents the result of a corpus search, in which the verb “starve,” when used metaphorically to refer to suffering because of the lack of something other than food, appears in one of the following three structures: “starv∗ + of + noun” (e.g., “starved of weapons”), “noun + - + starved” (e.g., “investment-starved”), and “starv∗ + for + noun” (e.g., “starving for publicity”).

²I have also found in the BNC notable metaphorical expressions of emotion by means of vehicles describing uncontrollable natural phenomena related to elements other than water, such as “crosswinds of emotion,” “inflamed rush of feeling,” and “eruption of feeling,” where we see violent movements of air, fire, and earth on a large scale.

³Among the examples shown in Table 5, “drought of emotion” and “stagnant pool of emotion” are retrieved from Google (http://www.google.co.jp/).