The Rationale for the Theme Session Proposal

Current theorising on self in social psychology, cross-cultural psychology and anthropology has proposed that self is a situated, culturally constructed object. Research in social psychology, anthropology and other related disciplines have sought to ground the emergence of the ‘constructed’ self in cross-national variables such as individualism-collectivism, femininity-masculinity, and cultural philosophical models of the person (e.g., Kashima et al. 1995). Within this research, the study of the conceptualisation of emotions across languages and cultures has become a rich empirical field in understanding the varying conceptualisations of self in its relations to itself and the (social) environment (e.g., Mesquita 2001).

With its analytical tools rooted in the various fields of linguistics, cognitive linguistics is in an advantageous position to offer insights into the cultural universals and diversities emerging in the construal of self and emotions, and can function toward the cross-fertilisation of theoretical and methodological approaches among the various disciplines in the study of self and emotions.

The development of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Lakoff 1996), especially, and Natural Language Semantics (Wierzbicka 2005) have generated a wealth of research on cross-cultural similarities and differences in the way people understand, conceptualise and talk about themselves, and their emotions (e.g. Emanatian 1995). Kövecses (2005), for instance, proposes that the rise of the EXCHANGE metaphor for love in American English is rooted in the country’s social history. Such studies reveal that the observed variation inter-relates with varying conceptualisations of self (e.g., the conceptualisation of the person as consisting of body and mind in the Anglo-Saxon tradition and as body and kokoro (heart) in Japanese culture) (Wierzbicka 2005). Thus further exploration of the cultural traditions underlying the metaphorical expression of emotions, the cultural keywords emerging in emotion expression, and the discursive practices in talking about self and emotions can shed light on the manner in which self is conceptualised in relation to emotions, and offer insights into the interrelationship between self and culture.

The proposed theme session is an attempt to partly achieve this aim by bringing together studies from a range of language families (a) to explore the varying conceptualisations of love and anger; (b) to explore the ideal cultural models and cultural antecedents of understandings of love and anger; (c) to explore the underlying conceptualisation of self in the context of these emotions. The rationale for focusing on love and anger is that they have been identified as basic human emotions and that, while the former emotion has a strong interpersonal dimension, the latter also incorporates a strong personal dimension. In this way, the conceptualisation of self may be studied both in relation to itself and in relation to others.

References

Emanatian, M. (1995). Metaphor and expression of emotion: The value of cross-cultural perspective. Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 10, 163-182.
Kashima, Y., S. Yamaguchi, U. Kim, S-C. Choi, M. J. Gelfand and M. Yuki (1995). Culture, gender, and self: A perspective from individualism-collectivism research. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69: 925-937.
Kövecses, Zoltán (2005). Metaphor and Culture: Universality and Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lakoff, G. (1996). Sorry, I’m not myself today: The metaphor system for conceptualizing the self. In: Gilles Fauconnier and Eve Sweetser (eds.), Spaces, Worlds, and Grammar. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 91–123.
Lakoff, G. and Mark Johnson (1980). Metaphors We Live by. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press.
Mesquita, Batja (2001). Emotions in collectivist and individualist contexts. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 80 (1): 68-74.
Wierzbicka, A. (2005). Empirical universals of language as a basis for the study of other human universals and as a tool for exploring cross-cultural differences. Ethos 33 (2): 256-291.