Universality versus variation in the conceptualization of anger: A question of methodology

Cognitive linguistic investigations into the metaphorical conceptualization of anger suggest that languages are remarkably similar on a schematic level, with intensity and control as two, possibly universal dimensions underlying the metaphorical conceptualization of anger. These dimensions, however, can manifest themselves in language-specific metaphors. Yet arriving at a definitive answer to the question of universality versus variation is hindered by (a) a relatively limited number of systematic, contrastive analyses; and (b) varied methodologies, with some papers adopting a type-based account, while others following a token-based analysis. We take up both challenges in the present paper with the aim of offering a more definitive answer to the question of the universality and variation of anger metaphors. We investigate the anger metaphors of a type-based analysis, focusing on dictionary data of anger-related idioms, and a token-based analysis, focusing on data collected from online corpora, in three languages: (American) English (2,000 random instances of the lemma anger from the Corpus of Contemporary American English), Hungarian (1,000 instances of the lemma düh from the Hungarian National Corpus) and Russian (1,000 instances of the lemma gnev from the Russian National Corpus). The lexical data were analyzed with the well-established Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP). Our results indicate that there is a great deal of congruence relative to shared metaphors in both approaches, but this derives from specific-level metaphors in the lexical approach, whereas it derives from more schematic, generic-level metaphors in the corpus-based approach. The study shows that the full picture of the metaphorical conceptualization of a complex emotion concept such as anger can only emerge with the combination of the type- and token-based approach.