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Article published In: Metaphor and the Social World
Vol. 8:2 (2018) ► pp.229–246

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Emotion metaphors in Spanish retain aspects of spatial meaning

 | Universidad de los Andes
 | University of Illinois at Chicago
Published online: 23 October 2018
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/msw.17015.rea
Abstract
Previous work has shown that the abstract use of the spatial prepositions in and on retains spatial meaning, such as containment and support that includes the control relationship between a located object (the figure) and a reference object (the landmark/ground) (Feist, M. I., & Gentner, D. (2003). Factors involved in the use of in and on . In R. Alterman & D. Kirsh (Eds.), Proceedings of the twenty-fifth annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 390–395). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Talmy, L. (1983). How language structures space. In H. Pick & L. Acredolo (Eds.), Spatial orientation: Theory, research, and application (pp. 255–282). New York: Plenum Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). We extend these ideas to the case of metaphorical descriptions of emotion in Spanish—some of them featuring the emotion as a located entity in the person’s body, others featuring emotion as the ground in which the person’s body stands. Two rating experiments show that people judge emotions in Spanish as more controllable when they are described as located entities (the figure) than when they are described as grounds. We conclude that functional elements of the spatial meaning of the preposition en in Spanish are extended to abstract uses in metaphor, affecting the perceived controllability of emotions.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Spatial meaning in abstract uses of prepositions
    • 1.2Figure/ground relation in metaphors of emotion
  • 2.Study 1
    • 2.1Method
      • 2.1.1Participants
      • 2.1.2Materials
      • 2.1.3Procedure
    • 2.2Results of Study 1
  • 3.Study 2
    • 3.1Method
      • 3.1.1Participants
      • 3.1.2Materials
      • 3.1.3Procedure
    • 3.2Results of Study 2
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgement
  • References
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