Abstract
This article deals with the words pride, proud and proudly in a cognitive linguistic framework, addressing the questions: (1) What causes pride? (2) Which other concepts are associated with pride? (3) What are people’s behavioural reactions to pride? (4) Which conceptual metaphors contribute to people’s understanding of pride? It discusses and compares three periods, Late Middle and Early Modern English (1400–1700), Late Modern English (1700–1900), and Present-Day (20th century) English, with the aim of tracing possible changes in the conceptualization of pride. The data comes from five electronic corpora of English containing a number of different text types.
Highlights
“ [...] a value scale for actions, possessions, appearances, social positions, and so forth [...] can be imagined as a scale that is oriented UPWARDS, and that has a threshold associated with it [...] One’s pride is justified if the cause of one’s pride is above the threshold on the value scale
Taking Kövecses’s discussion of pride (1986: 39–60; 1990: 88–108) as a starting-point, it looks at corpus data representing Early Modern English, Late Modern English, and Present-Day English (20th century), in order to see whether his description of the concept agrees with the behaviour of the word pride, including the noun and the verb, and even the adjective proud, and the adverb proudly,1 in a wide range of
This does not rule out an understanding of PRIDE as AN EMOTION which accompanies other emotions, especially LOVE, and makes people behave in a certain manner
Summary
“ [...] a value scale for actions, possessions, appearances, social positions, and so forth [...] can be imagined as a scale that is oriented UPWARDS, and that has a threshold associated with it [...] One’s pride is justified if the cause of one’s pride is above the threshold on the value scale. The introductory quote comes from Kövecses’s (1986, 1990) work on the emotion concept of PRIDE in the English language which inspired this research. His focus is on American English and he discusses the concept of PRIDE in order to relate it to other emotions and to provide a model for the general concept of EMOTION. My aim is slightly different: I wish to study English language corpora in order to see how possibly antonymous emotion words, such as pride and shame (Tissari 2006), behave in them, and to add a diachronic dimension to the popular branch of research on the conceptual metaphors of emotions. The focus may seem fairly narrow, but it is suggested that this kind of survey could supplement or be supplemented by, for example, discussions of how specific literary authors treat the concept of pride
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