Emotion metaphors in new Englishes

Abstract

AbstractResearch into emotion concepts has become an established part of the cognitive-linguistic research agenda and has often revolved around the competing notions of universality (from the perspective of embodied cognition) and (cross- and within-cultural) variation (seeKövecses 2005). At the same time, a relatively recent approach to socio-variational aspects of language in the form of Cognitive Sociolinguistics has created an ideal platform for the study of variation in institutionalized second-language varieties of English, often referred to as new Englishes (seeKristiansen & Dirven 2008;Wolf & Polzenhagen 2009). This paper aims at bringing together these two research strands in a study devoted to variation on the level of metaphor in new Englishes, specifically involved in the conceptualization of emotion. While metaphor is theoretically understood within the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson 1980), this study will make use of a corpus-based method of metaphor retrieval and identification informed by Stefanowitsch’s (2004,2006) Metaphorical Pattern Analysis (MPA) andSteen et al.’s (2010)method for linguistic metaphor identification (MIPVU).angermetaphors will be examined for four second-language varieties of English, namely those spoken in Nigeria, Kenya, India, and Singapore, which are represented in theGlobal Web-based Englishcorpus (GloWbE;Davies 2013).With the assumption that metaphor variation emerges in a variety’s preference for certain source domains in emotion-based mappings vis-à-vis other varieties, the main questions at the core of the analysis are: (1) Which source domains are employed in a respective variety to conceptualizeanger? and (2) To what extent are the source domain preferences of new Englishes similar to a norm-providing variety, namely British English? Although initial results reveal much similarity, some differences in the data are highlighted at a deeper level of analysis. Thus, a discussion of the results provides a basis for inter-variety comparison ofangermetaphors and, thus, contribute to the universality / variation debate.