Investigation of the emotions entails reference to words and expressions conventionally used for the description of emotion experience. Important methodological issues arise for emotion researchers, and the issues are of similarly central concern in linguistic semantics more generally. I argue that superficial and/or inconsistent description of linguistic meaning can have seriously misleading results. This paper is firstly a critique of standards in emotion research for its tendency to underrate and ill-understood linguistic semantics. It is secondly a critique of standards in (...) some approaches to linguistic semantics itself. Two major problems occur. The first is failure to distinguish between conceptually distinct meanings of single words, neglecting the well-established fact that a single phonological string can signify more than one conceptual category (i.e., that words can be polysemous). The second error involves failure to distinguish between two kinds of secondary uses of words: (1) those which are truly active “online” extensions, and (2) those which are conventionalised secondary meanings and not active (qua “extensions”) at all. These semantic considerations are crucial to conclusions one may draw about cognition and conceptualisation based on linguistic evidence. (shrink)

Anthropologists and linguists have long been aware that the body is explicitly referred to in conventional description of emotion in languages around the world. There is abundant linguistic data showing expression of emotions in terms of their imagined ¿locus¿ in the physical body. The most important methodological issue in the study of emotions is language, for the ways people talk give us access to ¿folk descriptions¿ of the emotions. ¿Technical terminology¿, whether based on English or otherwise, is not excluded from (...) this ¿folk¿ status. It may appear to be safely ¿scientific¿ and thus culturally neutral, but in fact it is not: technical English is a variety of English and reflects, to some extent, culture-specific ways of thinking (and categorising) associated with the English language. People ¿ as researchers studying other people, or as people in real-life social association ¿ cannot directly access the emotional experience of others, and language is the usual mode of ¿packaging¿ one¿s experience so it may be accessible to others. Careful description of linguistic data from as broad as possible a cross-linguistic base is thus an important part of emotion research. All people experience biological events and processes associated with certain thoughts (or, as psychologists say, ¿appraisals¿), but there is more to ¿emotion¿ than just these physiological phenomena. Speakers of some languages talk about their emotional experiences as if they are located in some internal organ such as ¿the liver¿, yet they cannot localise feeling in this physical organ. This phenomenon needs to be understood better, and one of the problems is finding a method of comparison that allows us to compare descriptions from different languages which show apparently great formal and semantic variation. Some simple concepts including feel and body are universal or near-universal, and as such are good candidates for terms of description which may help to eradicate confusion and exoticism from cross-linguistic comparison and semantic typology. Semantic analysis reveals great variation in concepts of emotion across languages and cultures ¿ but such analysis requires a sound and well-founded methodology. While leaving room for different approaches to the task, we suggest that such a methodology can be based on empirically established linguistic universal (or near-universal) concepts, and on ¿cognitive scenarios¿ articulated in terms of these concepts. Also, we warn against the danger of exoticism involved in taking all body part references ¿literally¿. Above all, we argue that what is needed is a combination of empirical cross-linguistic investigations and a theoretical and methodological awareness, recognising the impossibility of exploring other people¿s emotions without keeping language in focus: both as an object and as a tool of study. (shrink)

The metaphorical components of two cognitive models of moral/political systems, presented in Lakoff (1996 [2002]), were tested empirically, using a set of televised debates between two candidates for US president as data. Few verbal metaphoric expressions were found in the data which directly reflected the conceptual metaphors proposed in the models. However, a large number of mostly non-metaphoric expressions were found which constitute entailments of the models. This suggests a form of reasoning according to the logic of the proposed metaphors. (...) The speakers’ metaphoric gestures in one of the debates were then coded and analyzed. Quantitative analysis produced results similar to the linguistic analysis, but qualitative analysis highlighted significant differences between the models, both in terms of their composition and how they can be expressed. The study raises methodological issues for metaphor research, and theoretical questions about the ways of identifying and labeling conceptual metaphors and about the status of cognitive and cultural models. (shrink)