Exploring diachronic salience of emotion metaphors

Abstract

This paper analyzes metaphorical conceptualizations of happiness in the historical corpus of Classical Malay and in the corpus of present-day Indonesian, the national variety of Malay used in Indonesia. The aim is to explore the idea of diachronic salience and universal/variation in metaphorical conceptualizations between diachronic varieties of the same language. Token and type frequencies are used as measures of salience of the metaphors. Seven of the top-10 metaphors in Classical Malay with high token and type frequencies also make into the top-10 metaphors ranked by these measures in Indonesian, suggesting a relatively stable diachronic salience of the metaphoric cognitive models of happiness in these two Malay varieties. The shared metaphors are parts of larger networks of semantic domains, namely possession, location, motion, containment, and quantity. The metaphors are discussed in relation to themes reported in earlier cross-cultural psychological studies of the cultural folk models of happiness.