Chapter 13. Armed with patience, suffering an emotion

This chapter examines the significance of two concepts for the target domains self and life in Turkish. More specifically, the Turkish words sabır ‘patience’ and çile ‘suffering’ are identified as source domains that structure not only emotion metaphors but also other target domains. We analyse conventionalized metaphorical expressions that employ these two source terms in data collected from Google searches and the two-million-word M(iddle) E(ast) T(echnical) U(niversity) corpus of Turkish. Data from contemporary dictionaries and the Turkish National Corpus at Mersin University are also examined. Taken together, these data reveal that sabır and çile are culturally salient concepts that serve to structure Turkish speakers’ understanding of life, morality, and emotion.