The Conceptualization of anger through Metaphors, Metonymies and Metaphtonymies in Jordanian Arabic and English: A Contrastive Study

Abstract

This study aims to examine the metaphors, metonymies and their interaction in Jordanian Arabic (ja) to conceptualize anger. It also investigates the differences/similarities in the conceptualization of anger in ja and English to determine if culture has a role in its metaphorical and metonymical conceptualization. The study adopts Conceptual Metaphor Theory (cmt) and Cultural Linguistics (cl) as theoretical frameworks to identify and analyze the target metaphors and metonymies. The ja data was collected from two sources: 20 female and male ja native-speaker informants and a Jordanian comedy show called ‘Female’. The English anger metaphors and metonymies were collected from Lakoff and Kövecses’s (1987) study. The qualitative data analysis has revealed that anger is conceptualized in ja through conceptual metaphors with a metonymic basis, pure conceptual metaphors, pure conceptual metonymies and conceptual metonymies with a metaphorical interpretation. The results show that similarities were found in the conceptualization of anger through metaphor and metonymy in both languages which were ascribed to universal embodied cognition. Differences were also detected between the two languages, especially in the use of culture-specific source domains and in the use of metaphtonymies (conceptual metonymies with metaphorical interpretation) that may reflect cultural beliefs related to anger.