engleski

Structuring and (Re)creating the Affective value of Emotional Categories. A corpus study of Embodied Metonymic and Metaporic constructions of FEAR

This poster presents a corpus based research in the conceptualization of emotional category FEAR in Croatian language from the perspective of cognitive science and demonstrates the embodied basis of cognition, categorization and communication of the emotion category FEAR in relation to the physiological processes of perception, representation and reaction. The conceptualization of emotion is presented as a dynamic cognitive process emerging from neurobiological, psychological and symbolic structures. The cognitive organization and semantic expression of emotions are analyzed on three functional levels: a) awareness of the core affect, b) formation of the prototypical emotional categories, and c) coding of the (prototypical) emotional experience in the symbolic structures. In accordance with the recent cognitive and affective theories of emotion, the level of core affect is described as a qualitative state with fuzzy dimensions of hedonic valence and arousal produced by the somatosensory and somatovisceral responses to the incoming sensory information. Following the cognitive theories of categorization, the shaping of emotional categories is explained by the schematization of the core affect driven by the processes of cognitive economy and implicit memory. Prototypical emotional episodes are categorized and linguistically expressed in the symbolic code as emotional lexical concepts. On the conceptual level, an emotional lexical concept is framed in a matrix of neural networks that form cognitive models with various domains pertaining to the embodied experience of co-occurring bodily reactions as well as other contextual and cultural information of an emotional event, such as the object of emoting, motives, manner of expression, empathy target, etc. The emergent structure of meaning arises from the sum of connections that are activated and potentially rearranged within a cognitive model. Due to the epistemological non commensurability, interpersonal expression of emotional lexical concept is characterized by metonymic and metaphoric mappings from cognitive and cultural domains that facilitate simulation and recreation of affective experience.

Emotion; emotional category; conceptual metonymy; conceptual metaphor; corpus-based research; embodied cultural conceptualization; structure of lexical concept

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