Metaphor and Emotion: Language, Culture, and Body in Human Feeling

by Zoltán Kövecses

Overview

Many researchers claim that emotions arise either from human biology (i.e., biological reductionism) or as products of culture (i.e., social constructionism). Are human emotions best characterized as biological, psychological, or cultural entities? Zoltan Kovecses demonstrates how cultural aspects, metaphorical language, and human physiology are part of an integrated system. This book challenges the simplistic division between the body and culture by stressing how human emotions are to a large extent "constructed" from individuals' embodied experiences in different cultural settings. Hb ISBN (2000): 0-521-64163-2

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521641630
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	02/28/2000
Series:	Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction
Pages:	242
Product dimensions:	6.34(w) x 9.29(h) x 0.87(d)
Lexile:	1270L (what's this?)

Table of Contents

1. Language and emotion concepts; 2. Metaphor of emotion; 3. Emotion metaphors: are they unique to the emotions?; 4. Events and emotions: the subcategorization of emotions; 5. The force of emotion; 6. Emotions and relationships; 7. Folk versus expert theories of emotion; 8. Universality in the conceptualization of emotion; 9. Cultural variation in the conceptualization of emotion; 10. Emotion language: a new synthesis.

Editorial Reviews

"Kovesces's work is an exemplary and provocative exploration in cognitive linguistics. He has chosen a set of important questions about emotions, and he shows how traditional attempts to characterize the language of emotion were overly restrictive...A work of penetrating scholarship, providing illuminating examples from a broad range of languages and cultures." Contemporary Psychology

From the Publisher