engleski

Metonymic construction of emotion categories. The role of metonymy in the conceptualization and simulation of emotional affects: Contributions from the cognitive linguistics approach to the research in neurobiology of emotions.

The linguistic expression and communication of emotion can be seen as a cognitive process of construing the meaning of embodied affective states endowed with intentional and qualitative content. In order for this subjective content to be communicated and commensurably codified, affective states have to be categorized and made available for cultural transmission in symbolic constructions. Construing the emotional meaning thus consists of structuring, conceptualizing and recreating the emotional affects. The structuring of an emotion can be analyzed in accordance with recent constructionist theories of emotion (Feldman Barrett ; Damasio ; Davidson ; Pankseep) as emerging from neurobiological processes functionally dedicated to produce core affect, out of which emerge prototypical emotional episodes that are categorized and expressed in linguistic symbolic structures. The core affect, prototypical emotional categories and symbolic expression represent different functional levels, with corresponding neural correlates, that respectively structure the feeling of an emotion and cultural model(s) of emotional lexical concept(s). From the semantic perspective, it can be assumed that culturally conventionalized emotional lexical concepts activate the hedonic value of the core affect. However, the subjective nature of emotional experience, the epistemological problem of commensurability and the variances in cross-cultural emotional categories (Wierzbicka, Lutz) indicate the need for the conceptualization of emotional lexical concepts and their construal via metonymical and metaphorical symbolic constructions. Within the Cognitive Linguistics approach, several (neuro)linguistic theories (Lakoff and Johnson, Kövecses) propose that the affective content of an emotional concept is activated basically by metonymic profiling of the lexical concept in terms of some perceived emotional reaction (i.e. bodily activation, face and voice, behavioural responses, etc.). Metonymic symbolic constructions facilitate the process of conceptualizing the emotions by recreating the quality of the embodied feeling in the semantic content. It is therefore argued that cognitive process of construing the meaning of emotion in the linguistic expression and communication essentially involves mental simulation of various embodied domains, and activation of several neural systems, that constitute the qualitative value of affective states. The aim of this presentation is to offer insights from a corpus based research of emotional conceptualization of fear in Croatian language. The study is based on the analysis of lexical concept strah ‘fear’ in textual corpus of 131, 8 Mw. Within that corpus 14 875 instances of lemma strah ‘fear’ were retrieved, presenting a basis for identification of metonymic and metaphoric constructions of the target domain STRAH ‘FEAR’. This approach is based on the tenets of the cognitive linguistics: embodiment and experiential realism ; with emphasis on the theory of conceptual metonymy, (neuro)conceptual metaphor and the role of linguistic construal in the conceptualization. The proposed emergent model of metonymic conceptualization of emotional categories highlights the neuro-biological basis of embodied reaction and perception of emotion, while the connectionist semantic analysis indicates the specific neural circuits enabling simulation and construction of meaning. It is proposed that methodology used for corpus-based studies of metonymic and metaphorical constructions could provide valuable insights for further cognitive and neurological research of the embodied neural structure of affective categories, as well as the methodology for qualitative and quantitative inter-cultural, cross-cultural and ideological description of emotional conceptualization.

Emotion; emotional category; conceptual metonymy; conceptual metaphor; corpus-based research; embodied cognition; lexical concept

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