Whose anger?
The conceptualization of ANGER in American English, Hungarian, and Russian
What does an English, Hungarian, or Russian speaker mean by anger? As one of the basic emotions of human emotional experience, anger informs and guides many of our choices and actions; it has also played an evolutionary role for promoting survival. As such, it has received considerable scholarly attention in a number of disciplines, such as cognitive and developmental psychology, psychopathology, neurobiology, psychiatry, etc. ANGER has also attracted considerable research interest within cognitive linguistics, more specifically, within metaphor research. One important question that has interested metaphor researchers since about 1987, when Lakoff and Kövecses published their research on the concept of ANGER in American English, is whether everyone in the world understands this emotion concept in the same way, or whether it varies from language to language and culture to culture.
Cognitive linguistic investigations into the metaphorical conceptualization of ANGER so far suggest that languages are remarkably similar on a schematic level, with intensity and control as two, possibly universal dimensions underlying the metaphorical conceptualization of ANGER. These dimensions, however, can manifest themselves in language-specific metaphors.
Yet arriving at a definitive answer to the question of universality versus variation is hindered by (a) a relatively limited number of systematic, contrastive analyses; and (b) varied methodologies, with some papers adopting a type-based account, while others following a token-based analysis.
We take up both challenges in the paper entitled Universality versus variation in the conceptualization of ANGER: A question of methodology, with the aim of offering a more definitive answer to the question of the universality and variation of ANGER metaphors. This study is the first of its kind to offer a combined methodology of a lexical approach and a corpus-based approach to systematically compare the metaphorical conceptualization of anger across three, unrelated languages. We investigate the ANGER metaphors of a type-based analysis, focusing on dictionary data of ANGER-related idioms, and a token-based analysis, focusing on data collected from online corpora, in three languages: (American) English (2,000 random instances of the lemma anger from the Corpus of Contemporary American English), Hungarian (1,000 instances of the lemma düh from the Hungarian National Corpus)and Russian (1,000 instances of the lemma gnev from the Russian National Corpus). The lexical data were analyzed with the well-established Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP).
Our results indicate that there is a great deal of congruence relative to shared metaphors in both approaches, but this derives from specific-level metaphors in the lexical approach, whereas it derives from more schematic, generic-level metaphors in the corpus-based approach. Therefore, our major finding is that the two methodologies offer different, yet complementary results. When it thus comes to the question of universality vs. variation, the outcome of any comparative research depends to a great extent on the kind of methodology that is employed: a type-based or a token-based approach. The study shows that the full picture of the metaphorical conceptualization of a complex emotion concept such as ANGER can only emerge with the combination of the type- and token-based approach.