Session Description

The papers in Part I of the theme session focus on the conceptualisation of love and self in Chinese, English, Polish, and Turkish from a variety of methodological perspectives, including interviewing and the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT). The papers reveal both common and diverging conceptualisations that stem from differing cultural ideologies (e.g., Cartesian philosophy, Sufism, and the non-existence of boundaries in being), and cultural level values (e.g., the masculinity-femininity dimension) related to models of love, societal norms, and communication. NIEMEIER investigates heart expressions in four categories in English, and explains why the cultural model associated with the heart is strong in the language, by noting the symbolic value of the concept in the Western tradition. Focusing on the lexemes for ‘heart’ in Turkish, RUHİ explores the underlying conceptual metaphors and explains how they represent different aspects of the self of lover and the beloved. The paper traces the cultural antecedents of the conceptualisations of the lover and the beloved to the Sufist tradition of love. AKSAN concentrates on love metaphors unique to Turkish for the purpose of revealing the construal of Turkish lover’s self. The paper concludes that ‘force-related’ love metaphors characterize Turkish lovers as passive experiencers, while ‘relationship-related’ love metaphors portray the introverted attitude along the love path. WINIARSKA describes the various metaphors of love and lovers in H. Poświatowska’s poems. The paper observes that the most significant metaphors use the Great Chain of Beings, and that, although lovers may be conceptualised as containers, they may or may not have boundaries. Looking in the socio-cultural conceptualisation of love in Chinese, HU observes gender distinctions in the conceptualisation of love, and tests the idea that females may be conceptualising love as involving intimacy and psychological closeness.

Part II of the session looks into metaphors related to anger in Chinese, Japanese, Malay, and Turkish. The lens of a variety of disciplines (social psychology, cultural linguistics, online speech processing) are employed to unravel the cultural assumptions and cognitive processing in experiences of anger. The papers discuss the inter-relationships between social interaction, and the self and anger, and offer new perspectives to studying the conceptualisation of emotions. HO-ABDULLAH and RASHID compare the metaphorisation of love and anger in Malay, and aim to explain why love metaphors reveal aspects of the conceptualisation of the self and why the conceptualisations of self may not be gleaned from anger metaphors in the language. AKSAN employs the CMT model to investigate varying conceptualisations of anger in Turkish. He posits a dualistic structuring of the emotion, stemming from the prevalence of both individualistic and collectivistic tendencies in Turkish culture. Enriched by the theoretical implications of parameters of the self in psychology, NAKAJIMA reveals how cultural models of the relation between the individual self and society may lead to greater stress being experienced by individuals when they face collective anger in Japanese culture. HU compares the conceptualisation of anger in individualistic and collectivistic cultures, and proposes that anger in Chinese has a strong interpersonal dimension in the culture. ISHINO studies the inter-relationship between the use of metaphors related to anger and gestures, and describes how greater knowledge on the conceptualisation of emotions may be revealed by examining online speech processing.