A Corpus-based Study Of Anger Is Heat

Metaphor is traditionally viewed as a kind of figures of speech. However, people's cognition of metaphor has changed a lot since the publication of Metaphors We Live By (1980) which is written by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Metaphor is regarded as not only a linguistic phenomenon, but also an important and universal way of thinking and cognizing in our conceptual system.Emotion is an essential and indispensable part of human being, so studies on emotion are quite important to human cognition. Cognitive linguists claim that metaphor is not only an instrument of human cognition and thought, but also plays an important role in emotion concepts. Though human emotion is abstract in nature, it can be conceptualized and expressed by metaphor. In this thesis, anger is chosen since it is the most basic and important emotion of human being. And I hope that the conceptualization of emotion metaphors can be further explored from this angle. Based on the metaphor corpus—Metalude, which is built up by Andrew Goatly, this thesis studies the metaphor ANGER IS HEAT with the bottom-up method. By reclassifying the related lexicalized metaphors selected from Metalude and analyzing these lexicalized metaphors respectively according to the classification, this thesis demonstrates the correctness of the interrelated theories, and probes into the pertinent features and conceptualization of the metaphor ANGER IS HEAT. Meanwhile, this thesis discusses the interplays of culture, body, and the metonymic basis, and how they work together to conceptualize the emotion of anger.