Edited by Mario Brdar, Stefan Th. Gries and Milena Žic Fuchs
[Human Cognitive Processing 32] 2011
► pp. 291–304
In this chapter I relate the metonymic, embodied basis of emotion metaphors, illustrated, for example, by Zoltán Kövecses’s research in the 1980s and 1990s, to the concept of affect as discussed in a tradition founded by Silvan Tomkins. I focus on Tomkins’s claim that the responses of the body to stimulation constitute the affect itself. This can be seen as a challenge to the theory of conceptual metaphor: to what extent are emotion metaphors actually metaphorical, or is Tomkin’s claim itself a metaphor? Instead of attempting to resolve this puzzle, attention is given to shame in particular, in order to illustrate how work on conceptual metaphors and an understanding of affect as a fundamentally embodied phenomenon might cross-fertilize each other.