This paper challenges the philosophical assumption that bodily sensations are free from normative constraints. It examines the normative status of bodily sensations through two studies: a corpus-linguistic analysis and an experimental investigation. The corpus analysis shows that while emotions are frequently subject to normative judgments concerning their appropriateness, similar attitudes are less evident towards bodily sensations like feelings of pain, hunger and cold. In contrast, however, the experimental study reveals notable differences in conceptions of bodily sensations. It finds that sensations (...) of hunger and cold are occasionally subject to normative assessment, with about half of the participants considering it reasonable to assess these sensations normatively. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the conceptualization of anger as viewed from two disciplinary perspectives: Conceptual Metaphor Theory and emotion psychology. In the first study, twenty varieties of anger lexicalized in three languages are characterized using the Metaphorical Profile Approach, a quantitative corpus-based assessment of the meaning of emotion words in metaphorical contexts. In the second study, the same set of lexemes is analyzed using a psycholinguistic feature-rating instrument adapted to the study of near-synonyms. Our results demonstrate congruence of the two (...) methods in unveiling the internal organization of the anger family of terms in each language, and the reasons for this organization. In particular, the metaphorical and the feature-based profiles provide consistent insight about variation in bodily heat, expressiveness, regulation, action tendencies, regulation, and the temporal characteristics of anger experiences. To conclude, we discuss the mutual complementarity of the two profiling methodologies and their relevance for a wider research context. (shrink)

This article explores the metaphorical models English speakers employ in their understanding of transgenderism. Transgender is the term ascribed to those who have begun or completed a change in their sex characteristics from male to female or female to male. Using both qualitative and quantitative measures, I examine an archive of narrative data and a transition-specific corpus to show how spoken and written narrative support a spatially based representation of gender identity and transition. Two robust models are revealed in the (...) data, each carrying a set of suppositions consequential to how speakers understand their lived experience. I show how metaphor-evoking trigger lexemes relate to each model and can be used jointly to demonstrate conceptual salience. This investigation should be seen as part of an ever-growing body of research directed at revealing the unconscious assumptions, which organize speakers’ comprehension of complex topics with political relevance (cf. Charteris-Black, 2004; Lakoff, 2002,.. (shrink)