Wednesday 12 December 2012

[metaphorically looking][anger][2]


 


There is no reason why you should be finding here 
a piece of writing on conceptualization of anger. Anger has been 
widely studied in anthropology and cognitive linguistics across languages and time 
periods, to enable a multidimensional picture of how we structure and make sense of the experience.

There is no need to talk here on how we understand the abstract in terms of the physical or how we conceptualize the experience of the world in terms of our own experience of body in space. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have dedicated years of work establishing the understanding of 
metaphor as a mode of thinking, rather then a mere mode of speech.  They illustrated 
well, how we translate the abstract notions into the metaphorical representations 
of corresponding perceptual entities in the physical world - and those 
correspondences build conceptual metaphors, which govern our 
most fundamental understanding and structuring 
of human experience.

This is not an indepth study 
- and not even a superficial one. 
Lists of ANGER metaphors have 
been accumulated by now and 
cross-referenced across cultures 
and languages. As anyone 
bilingual or near-bilingual 
will know, some cultural 
bias in conceptualising 
anger exists, although 
part of it tends be 
consistently dominated 
by angry person is a 
pressurized container - 
a metaphor, which reflects 
on the physical reality of bodily 
changes (such as temperature and heart 
rate) experienced during a bout of anger 
(International Handbook of Anger: Constituent 
and Concomitant Biological, Psychological, and 
Social Processes, eds. Michael Potegal, Gerhard 
Stemmler, Charles Spielberger): as emotions get 
stronger, so does heat as well as pressure in the 
container, until they reach the critical point 
and cause in a rapid release of energy 
in an extreme manner, i.e. 
explosion.

A sudden release of energy - 
nuclear or emotional - causes an explosion, an earthquake, an outburst. 
All of those are as true in physics and geology as they are true in psychology.