engleski

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

Are human emotions best characterized as biological, psychological, or cultural entities? Many researchers claim that emotions arise either from human biology (i.e., biological reductionism) or as products of culture (i.e., social constructionism). This book challenges this 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. The book illustrates through detailed crosslinguistic analyses how many emotion concepts reflect widespread 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. Moreover, there are different cultural models for emotions that arise from unique patterns of both metaphorical and metonymic thinking in varying cultural contexts. 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. It is convincingly showed 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.

emotions; metaphor; metonymy; cultural models; crosslinguistic analyis; embodiment hypothesis

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