International Journal of Language and Culture - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2014

Cross-linguistic studies of emotion language have explored the universality of emotion concepts (Koveces 1990; Wierzbicka 1999), the cultural specificity of emotion concepts (Wierzbicka 1999; Ning Yu 2009), and the sources of emotion in culturally specific discourse practices (Lutz 1988; Rosaldo 1990; Chen 2004). A few have investigated how emotions or feelings are expressed by certain kinds of grammatical constructions such as metaphors with predicate-base clause structure (Occhi 1999; Palmer and Brown 1998; Palmer, Bennett and Stacey 1999; and Palmer 2003b). This paper shows how grammatical constructions that express emotions and evaluations may arise from subjectification. We compare theories of subjectification proposed by Langacker (2000) and Traugott (2010), and we analyze examples from Shona and Tagalog. Our findings have led us to expand Langacker’s cognitive linguistic approach to include cultural scenarios and themes in the discourse ground. This new perspective has potential applications to the study of ideological communications.

The issue of context has been, in the main, neglected in cognitive linguistic and much other work on how conceptual systems change and vary. In most recent work on conceptual systems, the issues of embodied cognition and the universal nature of cognitive operations have been emphasized. By contrast, my major goal in this paper is to attempt to characterize some of the contextual factors that are involved in shaping the conceptual system. My focus will be on metaphorical concepts, as well as on the interaction between metaphorical aspects of the conceptual system and contextual factors. I also suggest that the different conceptual factors do not mechanically and automatically lead to differences in the metaphorical conceptualization of a concept. Instead, they can affect non-metaphorical aspects of concepts.

Over the last two decades, questions of languages’ cultural specificity, diversity, and of linguistic universalism versus relativism, have increasingly been applied to the study of metaphor in analyses that take data from a wide range of languages into account. After reviewing existing research on cross-cultural metaphor variation, this paper focuses on the phenomenon of ‘false-friend metaphors,’ i.e., seemingly identical mappings which reveal hidden culture-specific differences when used in intercultural communication and in contrastive analysis. Examples of this phenomenon are drawn (1) from interpretations tasks concerning the metaphor THE STATE IS A (HUMAN) BODY, and (2) from cross-cultural research on the concept of SOCIAL FACE. In conclusion, a preliminary categorization of types of metaphor-induced intercultural misunderstanding is proposed.

This paper examines semantic change in the adjective divine as evidenced in its attributive constructions in Late Modern American English. Even before modern English times, the word was capable of bearing two meanings, one spiritual and one non-spiritual. However, according to the Oxford English dictionary, the adjectival divine, a Middle English loanword from Old French, was used earlier (fourteenth century) in the spiritual sense “pertaining to God” and later (fifteenth century) in the non-spiritual sense “supremely good,” and further that it was used primarily in the spiritual sense and secondarily in the non-spiritual sense into modern English times. It is with semantic developments regarding these two senses in American English, particularly the rise in frequency and spread in the applicability of the non-spiritual sense of divine in American English, with which we are concerned here. A main object of the investigation is to identify metaphorical conceptualizations that have been responsible for the emergence of conceptual values, which themselves have facilitated the diachronic semasiological patterns observable in extant textual materials. The corpus of historical American English (COHA) is the source of the bulk of the data analyzed.

The concept of ‘mindfulness’ is increasingly used in the intercultural literature and yet so far it is largely just a heterogeneous construct with underspecified theoretical content. In this paper we draw on multidisciplinary perspectives to address this shortcoming and develop an integrated analysis of this important construct. We relate ‘mindfulness’ explicitly to the Relevance-theoretic concept of “manifestness”, and we incorporate insights from the psychology of motivation. We use extracts of authentic intercultural interactions to help explain and illustrate our arguments.

This article examines the status and functions of body-part words with respect to linguistic descriptions of emotions in Dalabon (Northern Australia). As in many languages in the world, words denoting invisible (internal) body-parts occur in figurative expressions. These expressions instantiate metaphors and metonymies inspired by non-observable somatic responses to emotions. In addition to this figurative pattern of usage, many more words for visible body-parts occur in expressions where they serve to produce more detailed descriptions of emotional behaviors — specifying which body-part is involved in a given emotional manifestation. The relatively widespread use of body-part words in such descriptions of emotions fosters semantic extensions, where some body-part nouns gain emotional connotations. The article analyzes these descriptive functions of body-part nouns in Dalabon, and examines how they reinforce semantic associations between body-parts and emotions.