Chapter published in:
Conceptual Metonymy: Methodological, theoretical, and descriptive issues
Edited by Olga Blanco-Carrión, Antonio Barcelona and Rossella Pannain
[Human Cognitive Processing 60] 2018
► pp. 205–236

The role of metonymy in the constructionist approach to the conceptualization of emotions

| University of Rijeka
Based on the corpus analysis of the conceptualization of strah ‘fear’ in Croatian, this chapter demonstrates that the conceptual structure of emotions emerges from syntactic and semantic organization activated by sensory-motor, ontological, spatial, thematic and agentive linguistic constructions. The proposed emergent constructionist model argues for a hierarchal organization of the metonymic and metaphorical conceptualizations. In terms of cognitive hierarchy, the model shows that sensory-motor metonymic profiling is the most basic, distinctive and, therefore, the most informative mechanism of conceptualizing emotions because it conveys knowledge about the affective state, enabling simulations of the quality of a specific emotion category, while additional metaphorical mechanisms build on metonymic conceptualizations using other general cognitive abilities expressing knowledge about objects, properties, relations and events.
Keywords: cognitive hierarchy, emergent constructionist model, fear, sensory-motor metonymies
Published online: 17 May 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.60.08per
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