ANGER metaphors in American English and Kabyle

Abstract

The position standardly held in cognitive linguistics is that anger is an emotion concept that communicates about human thinking and which is instantiated in language in ways that are often metaphorically, systematically, and conceptually structured. The container metaphor is claimed to be near-universal (Kövecses 2000), but also subject to variation (Kövecses 2005). Variation in metaphor frequencies across languages has also been investigated (Boers & Demecheleer 1997; Boers 1999; Deignan 2003; Kövecses et al. 2015). This article reports a corpus-based contrastive investigation of anger metaphors in American English and Kabyle — a Tamazight language variety spoken in the northern part of Algeria. Its main objective is to contrast these metaphors and try to find out the most used ones in these languages through a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the token frequency of linguistic expressions belonging to each of the conceptual metaphors, the type frequency of their linguistic realizations, and the number of their mappings. Aspects of the anger scenario are also studied and contrasted. The findings indicate similarities and differences in the use of anger metaphors in the two languages. The three most frequently used metaphors in American English involve the container, possessed object and opponent source domains while the most frequently used ones in Kabyle involve the fire, container and possessed object source domains. These results confirm the near-universality of the container metaphor. However, the most frequently used metaphorical source domain concept is different in the two languages due to sociocultural influences. In addition, the findings relating to aspects of the anger scenario (intensity and control) support Lakoff and Kövecses’ (1987) prototype model of anger, although it is found to be influenced by sociocultural specificities in American English and Kabyle.