Love and Anger. The grammatical structure of conceptual metaphors

1. Introduction This article integrates grammatical analysis into the study of conceptal metaphors. Although the study accepts lexically based work in metaphors such as Lakoff's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, Johnson's The Body in the Mind, and Kovecses' Metaphors of Anger, Pride, and Love, it argues that these lexical approaches are insufficient to offer rigorous and complete analysis of cross-reference mapping. It takes the hypothesis that lexis and morpho-syntax are interdependent, presented by Langacker in especially Concept, Image, and Symbol and Grammar and Conceptualization and by Talmy in "The Relation of Grammar to Cognition" and Toward a Cognitive Semantics, and examines the grammatical structure of conceptual metaphors. The analysis focuses on two emotion concepts, ROMANTIC LOVE and ANGER. Firstly, the discussion demonstrates weaknesses in a lexically based analysis of conceptual metaphors by examining ANGER. It argues that current approaches to the study of metaphors lack both sufficient means for the verification of results and sufficient tools for revealing the structure of those results. The discussion moves to resolve these issues by examining the emotion concept LOVE. Instead of focusing purely on the lexical structure of the conceptual metaphor, it combines this with a study of grammatical structure. In doing so, it demonstrates how this grammatical evidence may help resolve problems faced by lexical analyses. Moreover, by drawing on the invariance hypothesis proposed by Lakoff in "The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor" and by Turner in "An Image-Constraint on Metaphor," it reveals details of conceptual structure that are not visible in lexical analysis, further supporting the need to systematically integrate grammatica l evidence into the study of cognitive semantics. Thus, by combining the invariance hypothesis and grammatical analysis, the study demonstrates that the internal structure of conceptual metaphors is more complex than is evident from lexical approaches typically taken in the study of these metaphors. 2. ?ANGER IS GIVING BIRTH: Verifying Co-occurrence Purely lexical analyses of cross-reference mapping do not offer enough scope for the verification of the results they produce. A lexically based study of conceptual metaphors is based on an assumption. This assumption is that if there are a reasonable number of similar semantic extensions (where both the source and target domains of the extensions are similar), then these extensions indicate the existence of a conceptual metaphor. All that is necessary to identify these domains, and or schema (cf. Clausner and Croft "Domains and Image Schemas"), is the identification of lexical co-occurrence. Cognitive semantics argues that such co-occurrence in "everyday metaphors" is neither a coincidence nor a superficial lexical phenomenon, but the surface result of conceptual structuring of the semantic system. As will be demonstrated below, this is not always the case, but that co-occurrence may at times be merely "co-incidental." If lexical co-occurrence does not necessarily represent cross-reference mapping, how can w e then determine which instances of co-occurring expressions represent metaphoric correspondences and which are "coincidental" in their similarity? The following section attempts to answer this question. However, before one broaches the question of "lexical co-incidence," one must also confront the closely related theoretical problem of set membership. 2.1. Set Membership of Conceptual Domains One of the fundamental questions that face cognitive semantics is the application of prototype set theory to its processes of analysis. The work of Geeraerts, Grondelaers et al., and Kleiber, amongst many others, has demonstrated the success of this application at a lexical level. This, however, remains to be successfully achieved in the study of metaphors. The current study does not broach this issue directly, but outlines its importance and offers tools of analysis that are needed to properly investigate prototype structures in cross-reference mapping. …