Abstract
This chapter studies metaphors for anger in four languages, American English, Spanish, Turkish, and Hungarian from a cognitive linguistic perspective. Our database includes large corpora and standard newspapers and magazines in the four languages for the past 10 years. First, we intend to uncover the most common conceptual metaphors in the respective languages. Second, we discuss the main systematic similarities and differences between the languages regarding the way anger is talked about and conceptualized in the languages under investigation. Given our results, we assess some of the implications of our work for the cross-cultural corpus-based study of metaphor. In particular, we propose a new complex measure of metaphorical salience as a tool to determine the cultural importance of conceptual metaphors.
Keywords: anger metaphor, conceptual metaphor, corpus analysis, metaphorical mappings, metaphorical salience
In the cognitive linguistic view, metaphor is conceptualizing one domain of experience in terms of another (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Kövecses, 2010). The domain of experience that is used to comprehend another domain is typically more physical, more directly experienced, and better known than the domain we wish to comprehend, which is typically more abstract, less directly experienced, and less known. The more concrete domain is called the source domain and the more abstract one is called the target domain. Domains of experience are represented in the mind as concepts given as mental frames. This is why we talk about conceptual metaphors.