On the conceptual, cultural and discursive motivation of Greek pain lexicalizations

Abstract

This paper provides evidence for the interaction of conceptual structure, cultural models and discursive practices in motivating pain lexicalizations and related constructions in Greek. It is argued that pain is construed as a process or state, a designated property, or an instance of a process or state, prototypically associated with an experiencer and a cause. The elaboration of this core semantics of pain by image-schematic and metaphorical structure and a cultural narrative of selfhood yields metaphorical extensions of pain as an entity and motivates its understanding in the physical and the psychological modalities. Finally, frequency counts of pain lexicalizations in different discourse genres provide evidence for the discursive motivation of the lexical categories at hand. These findings seem to argue for points of contact between cognitive linguistics (Lakoff 1987; Sweetser 1990; Langacker 2000), a discursive view of relativity (Clark 1996; Lucy 1996), and a neo-Whorfian perspective on language as a bio-cultural hybrid (Levinson 2003).