Is Emotion a Moved or a Self-Moving Object? The Concepts of Motion and Emotion in English Metaphors from a Frame-Semantic and Lexico-Grammatical Perspective: A Case Study of the Verb Stir
Abstract
The aim of the paper is to offer a corpus-based, frame-semantic and lexico-grammatical analysis of metaphorical linguistic expressions that employ the verb stir to conceptualize emotions. The studyreveals that stir, when used metaphorically in the conceptualization of a range of human emotions, participates in a causative-inchoative alternation. All thecorpus examples were annotated according to the frame elements expressed by particular constituents, their grammatical function and phrase type. We have also analysed the metaphorical expressions with respect to +/- caused parameter of the motion taxonomy, as proposed by Zlatev, Blomberg and Magnusson (2012).It has been demonstrated that the metaphorical linguistic expressions with the monovalent, anticausative stir instantiate the metaphor emotion is a self-moving object. The metaphorical use of the divalent, causative stir, on the other hand,can be interpreted according to theemotion is a moved object metaphor. It is believed that recognizing the interplay between these two perspectivesof the motion-emotion metaphors can lead to a more comprehensive understanding of how emotions are experienced and how they affect our behavior.
Keywords
Full Text:
PDFReferences
British National Corpus. 2007. Version 3. BNC XML Edition.
Cruse, Alan D. 1986. Lexical semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Emanatian, Michele . 1995. “Metaphor and the expression of emotion: The value of cross-cultural
perspectives”. Metaphor & Symbolic Activity 10(3): 163–182.
etymonline= Online Etymology Dictionary. http://www.etymonline.com/
Fillmore, Charles J. 1975. “An alternative to checklist theories of meaning.” In Proceedings of the first annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, ed. Cathy Cogen, Henry Thompson, Graham Thurgood, Kenneth Whistler and James Wright, 123-131. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society.
Fillmore, Charles J. 1976. “Frame semantics and the nature of language.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences: conference on the origin and development of language and speech 280: 20-32.
Fillmore, Charles J. 1977. “Scenes-and-frames semantics.” In Linguistics Structures Processing, ed. Antonio Zampolli, 55-81. Amsterdam and New York: North Holland Publishing.
Fillmore, Charles J. 1982. “Frame semantics.” In Linguistics in the morning calm, ed. The Linguistic Society of Korea, 111-137. Soeul: Hanshin.
Fillmore, Charles J. 1985. “Frames and the semantics of understanding.” Quaderni di Semantica 6: 222-254.
FrameNet = the Berkeley FrameNet project. https://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/fndrupal/
Haspelmath, Martin. 1993. “More on the typology of inchoative/causative verb alternations.” In Causatives and transitivity. Studies in language companion series, ed. Bernard Comrie and Maria Polinsky, 87-120. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Izdebska, Marietta. 2019. Conceptual metaphors related to cooking techniques in English: towards a frame-semantic approach. Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL.
Jacobsson, Göran. 2015. Motion-emotion metaphors in English, Swedish and Spanish: A cross-linguistic comparison. BA thesis. Lund University.
Khatin-Zadeh, Omid, Zahra Eskandari, Hassan Banaruee, and Fernando Marmolejo-Ramos. 2019. “Abstract metaphorical classes: A perspective from distributed models of conceptual representations”. Polish Psychological Bulletin 50: 108–113.
Kövecses, Zoltan. 2000. Metaphor and Emotion. Language, Culture, and Body in Human Feeling. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Kövecses, Zoltan. 2005. Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation. New York and Cambridge: CUP.
Kulikov, Leonid. 2001. “Causatives.” In Language typology and language universals. An international handbook, vol. 2, ed. Martin Haspelmath, Ekkehard König, Wulf Oesterreicher and Wolfgang Raible, 886-898. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors we Live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 2003. Metaphors we Live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lee, Albert and Li-Jun Ji. 2014. “Moving away from a bad past and toward a good future: Feelings influence the metaphorical understanding of time”. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 143: 21–26.
Levin, Beth. 1993. English verb classes and alternations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Levin, Beth, and Malka Rappaport Hovav. 1995. Unaccusativity: at the sytnax-lexical semantics interface. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Ogarkova, Anna, and Cristina Soriano. 2018. “Metaphorical and literal profiling in the study of emotions”. Metaphor and Symbol 33: 19–35
Oster, Ulrike. 2019. “Cross-cultural semantic and pragmatic profiling of emotion words. Regulation and expression of anger in Spanish and German.” In Current Approaches to Metaphor Analysis in Discourse, ed. Ignasi Navarro i Ferrando, 35-56. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter Mouton.
Pragglejaz Group. 2007. “MIP: a method for identifying metaphorically used words in discourse”. Metaphor and Symbol 22: 1-39.
Ruppenhofer, Josef, Michael Ellsworth, Miriam R. L. Petruck, Christopher R. Johnson, Collin F. Baker, and Jan Scheffczyk. 2016. FrameNet II: Extended Theory and Practice. California: International Computer Science Institute.
Stefanowitsch, Anatol. 2007. “Words and their metaphors: A corpus-based approach”. Corpus-Based Approaches to Metaphor and Metonymy, ed. Anatol Stefanowitsch and Stefan Th. Gries, 63-105. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter Mouton.
Woźny, Jacek. 2015. “Towards a method of cross-linguistic comparison of motion-emotion metaphors”. Linguistica Silesiana 36: 127-144.
Yu, N. (1995). “Metaphorical expressions of anger and happiness in English and Chinese”. Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 10, 59–92.
Zlatev, Jordan 2007. “Spatial semantics”. In The Oxford handbook of cognitive linguistics, ed. Hubert Cuyckens and Dirk Geeraerts, 318–350. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zlatev, Jordan. 2008. „The dependence of language on consciousness”. Journal of Consciousness Studies 15: 36–62.
Zlatev, Jordan, Johan Blomberg and Caroline David. 2010. „Translocation, language and the categorization of experience”. In Language, space and cognition, ed. Vyvyan Evans and Paul Chilton, 389–418. London: Equinox.
Zlatev, Jordan, Johan Blomberg and Ulf Magnusson. 2012. “Metaphor and subjective experience. A
study of motion-emotion metaphors in English, Swedish, Bulgarian, and Thai”. In Moving ourselves, moving others: motion and emotion in intersubjectivity, consciousness and language, ed. Ad Foolen, Ulrike M. Lüdtke, Timothy P. Racine and Jordan Zlatev, 423–450. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17951/nh.2025.0.31-41
Date of publication: 2025-12-31 08:44:35
Date of submission: 2025-08-06 14:58:44
Statistics
Indicators
Refbacks
- There are currently no refbacks.
Copyright (c) 2025 Marietta Izdebska
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.