Metaphors of ANGER in Indonesian

What is it about?

As one of the fundamental human emotions, anger has been the subject of studies across different fields, including language sciences, particularly in Cognitive Linguistics (CogLing). CogLing's interest in anger constitutes a part of its broader interest in how an abstract concept like emotion, such as anger, is conceptualised and talked about in different languages and cultures. Previous CogLing studies have found the pervasiveness of figurative (e.g., metaphoric) thought manifesting in figurative verbal and non-verbal expressions of emotion. Several lingering questions remain unanswered comprehensively regarding the conceptualisation of anger: what aspects of the conceptualisation (or folk model) of anger are similar; what aspects vary and why they do so, given the hypothesis that, to a large extent, humans' shared bodily experiences underlie the folk model of anger across languages and cultures. This chapter investigates Indonesian language data to identify figurative expressions of anger, using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. The chapter is part of the cross-language endeavour to capture (i) similarities and variations in the figurative conceptualisation and expressions of anger and (ii) how different kinds of contexts help motivate the various anger metaphors and, thereby, the emerging conceptualisation of anger.

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Photo by Sherry Christian on Unsplash

Photo by Sherry Christian on Unsplash