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Article published In:
Cognitive Linguistic Studies
Vol. 10:1 (2023) ► pp.146–172

When happiness can be luck

A comparative study of conceptual metaphors of happiness and luck in English, German, Greek, and Slovene

ORCID logo | National Taiwan University
| National Taiwan University

Previous studies have mainly focused on orientational, structural and ontological metaphors of happiness, and have not distinguished between luck and happiness; the latter in many languages originates from the former. This research aims to bridge these gaps by examining event-structure and object (possession) metaphors of 8000 hits for happiness and luck in the corpora of English, German, Greek, and Slovene. Our results suggest that luck is cross-linguistically perceived as non-pursuable and as an entity outside a person through numerous object (possession) metaphors of luck, or as a deity based on many stationary-ego metaphors of luck. In contrast, happiness is understood as pursuable (through frequent quest metaphors of happiness) and as an entity within a person. This research proposes an embodied cognition model which includes orientational, psychological, and culture-specific embodiments to account for the cross-linguistic universalities and differences. Our study could contribute to overall human understanding of these two important concepts.

Keywords: happiness, luck, conceptual metaphor, corpus-based study, embodiment
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous studies on happiness within the framework of cognitive linguistics
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Theoretical framework and theoretical considerations
      • a. moving-ego / quest metaphors
      • b. stationary-ego metaphors
      • c. transfer metaphors
    • 3.2Data collection and analysis
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Universalities among languages
      • 4.1.1 quest metaphors of happiness and luck across languages
      • 4.1.2 object (possession) metaphors of happiness and luck across languages
      • 4.1.3 stationary-ego metaphors of happiness and luck across languages
    • 4.2Differences across languages
      • 4.2.1 quest metaphors of happiness and luck across languages
      • 4.2.2 transfer metaphors of happiness and luck across languages
    • 4.3Common characteristics of Slovene and German metaphors of happiness and luck
  • 5.Further discussion: Our proposed embodied cognition model of the cross-linguistic universalities and differences
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 5 October 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cogls.21020.las
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