Abstract
The issue I wish to address in this paper is this: What is the role of metaphor in the naive or folk understanding of anger? This is an interesting theoretical question in itself because it raises the more general issue of the nature of the relationship between metaphor and culture. The issue has also become a topical one in recent years. Quinn (1991) suggested that, contrary to a claim made by Lakoff and Kövecses (1987), metaphor simply reflects culture. Quinn (1991:60) writes: “I will be arguing that metaphors, far from constituting understanding, are ordinarily selected to fit a preexisting and culturally shared model.” In contrast, Lakoff and Kövecses claimed that metaphors largely constitute the naive understanding of anger, as based on their study of American English. Thus, we have two diametrically opposed views here: in one, metaphor reflects cultural models and in the other, metaphor constitutes cultural models. I will try to show that neither of these views is fully adequate to explain the relationship in the case of anger, and that a compromise view is both possible and necessary. To demonstrate the feasibility of such a composite compromise view, I will continue to use the concept of anger as an example.
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Kövecses, Z. (1995). Metaphor and the Folk Understanding of Anger. In: Russell, J.A., Fernández-Dols, JM., Manstead, A.S.R., Wellenkamp, J.C. (eds) Everyday Conceptions of Emotion. NATO ASI Series, vol 81. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8484-5_3
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