Theoretical perspectives on metaphor and emotion

of emotion in any given period.

2  Theoretical perspectives on metaphor and emotion

The theoretical history of emotion metaphors is as old as the theory of metaphor itself:

1 The Sonnets are cited following The Norton Shakespeare (Shakespeare 2008).

2 The concept of “absolute metaphors” as “translations” that “resist being converted back into authenticity and logicality” was introduced in 1960 by Hans Blumenberg in Paradigms of a Met-aphorology (2010, 3).

Emotion Metaphors and Literary Texts   17

Let us begin then, with the commonest and by far the most beautiful of tropes, namely metaphor, the Greek term for our translatio. It is not merely so natural a turn of speech that it is often employed unconsciously or by uneducated persons […]. It adds to the copious-ness of language by the interchange of words and by borrowing, and finally succeeds in accomplishing the supremely difficult task of giving a name to everything. (Quintilian 1922, 8.6.4–5; emphasis in original)

This passage from Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria mentions two characteristics of figurative speech that overlap with the core arguments of conceptual meta-phor theory. Firstly, Quintilian draws attention to the fact that metameta-phor is not an exclusively ornamental feature of refined speech but that we use metaphorical concepts frequently in our everyday language – without even noticing. Secondly, he argues that figurative language is able to fill lexical gaps, that it provides lin-guistic expressions wherever the so-called verbum proprium is missing: “A noun or a verb is transferred from the place to which it properly belongs to another where there is either no literal term or the transferred is better than the literal”

(Quintilian 1922, 8.6.5; emphasis in original). His examples suggest that the field of human emotions and affective dispositions is one in which metaphor’s capacity to supplement our lexical system is needed most: “We speak of a hard or rough man,” he says, because there is “no literal term for these temperaments” (Quin-tilian 1922, 8.6.6; emphasis in original). The same is true for the description of the following affective states: “we say that a man is kindled to anger (‘incensum irae’) or on fire with greed (‘inflammatum cupiditatae’) or that he has fallen into error (‘lapsum errore’)” because none of these processes can be rendered better

“in its own word (‘verbum proprium’) than in those we import from elsewhere”

(Quintilian 1922, 8.6.7; emphasis in original).

George Lakoff and his collaborators have amended and expanded Quintil-ian’s substitution theory of metaphor by insisting that metaphorical processes are not in fact based on the exchange of words or lexical positions but rather rely on the transfer of concepts and image schemas in order to make abstract phenomena accessible to our intellect in the first place. Metaphors, they argue, have a cogni-tive as well as an epistemological function, and structure the entire conceptual system on which our perception of the world is based: “human thought processes are largely metaphorical,” they claim (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 6). Their theory of conceptual metaphor can be summarized as follows:

In general it can be suggested that a conceptual metaphor consists of a source and a target domain and that the source domain is, at least in the everyday cases, typically better under-stood and more concrete than the target domain. (Kövecses 2008, 381)

The process of exchanging and replacing words from a paradigm of signifiers con-nected by similarity, as it is described by Quintilian, now becomes a process of conceptual mapping. According to Lakoff and Turner, the mapping process trans-fers properties and knowledge, as well as structures and relations, that belong to the concrete source domain to the abstract target domain, thereby connecting and blending both conceptual domains with one another, or even creating and inventing features of the target domain by building new properties and structures into it (Lakoff and Turner 1989, 54, 67).

Like Quintilian, the Hungarian scholar of linguistics Zoltán Kövecses has shown that conceptual metaphors also pervade everyday language about emo-tions. He has identified the basic concepts from which conventional expressions regarding various emotions are derived. In his notation each conceptual meta-phor is rendered in capitals and followed by examples of its linguistic actualiza-tion in italics:

LOVE IS A NUTRIENT: I am starved for love. […]

LOVE IS A FLUID IN A CONTAINER: She was overflowing with love.

LOVE IS FIRE: I am burning with love.

LOVE IS AN ECONOMIC EXCHANGE: I’m putting more into this than you are. […]

LOVE IS A NATURAL FORCE: She swept me off my feet.

LOVE IS AN OPPONENT: She tried to fight her feelings of love. […]

LOVE IS A SOCIAL SUPERIOR: She was completely ruled by love. (Kövecses 2000, 26) Although the capitalized concept of “LOVE” suggests that all these examples target the same phenomenon, it has to be noted that each of them actually addresses one specific aspect or component of the emotion. Phrases like “burning with love” or

“being starved for love” are not descriptive of love in general; they actually target the physiological symptoms associated with a very specific kind of romantic love, whereas the phrase “she was completely ruled by love” targets the problem of emotion regulation. “Each metaphor provides structure for comprehending a dif-ferent aspect of the target domain,” Lakoff and Turner argue (1989, 53). This func-tion of emofunc-tion metaphors is congruent with Klaus Scherer’s “component process model of emotion,” according to which each emotion episode comprises at least five different features, or stages, starting with a “cognitive component” named appraisal and a “neurophysiological component” consisting of neurological pro-cesses as well as physiological symptoms that manifest themselves in the body.

Furthermore, each emotion has a “motivational component” that determines a person’s “action tendencies” in response to a stimulus; and then there are facial and vocal expressions, which make up the so-called “motor-expression nent” (Scherer 2005, 698). Finally, emotions have a “subjective feeling compo-nent,” which determines the actual phenomenological experience of the emotion

Emotion Metaphors and Literary Texts   19 episode (Scherer 2005, 699). Scherer’s model conceives of emotions as complex multifaceted processes that involve all parts of the human organism. It can be used as a heuristic concept in the analysis of historical emotion discourses – even though these may be based on different theoretical premises, explanations, and terminologies.

But what exactly distinguishes basic conceptual metaphors from the figura-tive language used in Shakespeare’s poetry? Based on an analysis of different con-ceptualizations of death in poems by John Donne, Emily Dickinson, and others, Lakoff and Turner have argued that even the most intricate poetic metaphors are usually simply extensions or elaborations of basic conceptual metaphors (Lakoff and Turner 1989, 53–55). According to their study, the inventiveness one might attribute to poetic modes of figuration is not grounded in the discovery of new conceptual domains that would allow for original metaphorical expressions.

Instead, invention resides in the creative linguistic variation of metaphorical con-cepts that are already there. By looking at different conceptualizations of love in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, this hypothesis can be tested.

3  Conceptualizations of love in Shakespeare’s