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Article published In: Emotions across Languages and Cultures
Edited by Angeliki Athanasiadou and Ad Foolen
[International Journal of Language and Culture 4:1] 2017
► pp. 24–46

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Emotions travelling across cultures

Embodied grounding of English vis-à-vis Italian prepositional phrases

 | University of Pavia
Published online: 17 October 2017
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ijolc.4.1.03bai
Abstract
This article examines the ‘Adj em +PP’ construction in the English-Italian language pair (e.g., angry at my audacity/arrabbiato per la mia audacia) with the aim of identifying the kinaesthetic embodied schemas that motivate the language of emotions. The analysis of corpus data highlights the interplay between culture and mind, and the cross-linguistic comparison offers some interesting observations that appear to undermine some stereotypes about the way in which emotions are conceived of in the two cultures. Comparative semantics foregrounds the non-diagrammatic rendition in the translation of emotion language and allows for typological hypotheses about cultural cognition and the connection between Talmy’s dichotomy of manner-framed and path-framed languages.
Article outline
  • 1.Emotions and Cultural Linguistics
  • 2.Emotions and embodied cognition
    • 2.1Complex adaptive systems
    • 2.2Kinaesthetic embodied schemas
  • 3.The adjem  + PP construction
  • 4.Analysis of corpus data
    • 4.1About
    • 4.2At
    • 4.3By
    • 4.4For
    • 4.5In/Into
    • 4.6Of
    • 4.7Out of
    • 4.8Over
    • 4.9To
    • 4.10With
  • 5.Cultural cognition and typological remarks
  • 6.Concluding observations
  • Acknowledgement
  • Notes
  • References
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