When happiness can be luck

Abstract Previous studies have mainly focused on orientational, structural and ontological metaphors of happiness, and have not distinguished between luck and happiness; the latter in many languages originates from the former. This research aims to bridge these gaps by examining event-structure and object ( possession ) metaphors of 8000 hits for happiness and luck in the corpora of English, German, Greek, and Slovene. Our results suggest that luck is cross-linguistically perceived as non-pursuable and as an entity outside a person through numerous object ( possession ) metaphors of luck , or as a deity based on many stationary-ego metaphors of luck . In contrast, happiness is understood as pursuable (through frequent quest metaphors of happiness ) and as an entity within a person . This research proposes an embodied cognition model which includes orientational, psychological, and culture-specific embodiments to account for the cross-linguistic universalities and differences. Our study could contribute to overall human understanding of these two important concepts.