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Article published In:
Applying Embodied Cognition and Cognitive Linguistics to language teaching
Edited by Paolo Della Putta and Ferran Suñer
[Review of Cognitive Linguistics 21:1] 2023
► pp. 229–265
Regular articles

Exploring diachronic salience of emotion metaphors

A contrastive study of happiness metaphors in Classical Malay and Indonesian

ORCID logo | Udayana University
ORCID logo | Udayana University

This paper analyzes metaphorical conceptualizations of happiness in the historical corpus of Classical Malay and in the corpus of present-day Indonesian, the national variety of Malay used in Indonesia. The aim is to explore the idea of diachronic salience and universal/variation in metaphorical conceptualizations between diachronic varieties of the same language. Token and type frequencies are used as measures of salience of the metaphors. Seven of the top-10 metaphors in Classical Malay with high token and type frequencies also make into the top-10 metaphors ranked by these measures in Indonesian, suggesting a relatively stable diachronic salience of the metaphoric cognitive models of happiness in these two Malay varieties. The shared metaphors are parts of larger networks of semantic domains, namely possession, location, motion, containment, and quantity. The metaphors are discussed in relation to themes reported in earlier cross-cultural psychological studies of the cultural folk models of happiness.

Keywords: metaphorical conceptualizations, Classical Malay, Indonesian, happiness, diachronic salience, corpus linguistics, cognitive models
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1The need for diachronic metaphor studies
  • 2.Data and methods
    • 2.1Data source for Classical Malay and Indonesian
    • 2.2The studied happiness words
    • 2.3Metaphorical data retrieval and annotation
  • 3.Results and discussion
    • 3.1Top-10 metaphors ranked order by their token frequency
      • 3.1.1Happiness is a possessable object
      • 3.1.2Happiness is an imperiled entity
      • 3.1.3Happiness is a desired goal & Happiness is a moving object
      • 3.1.4Conceptualizations of Happiness via the location frame family
      • 3.1.5 intensity of happiness is the quantity of object
      • 3.1.6Happiness is a contained entity & Happiness is liquid in a container
      • 3.1.7Happiness is an (un)veiled object & Happiness is a submerged entity
      • 3.1.8Happiness is food
    • 3.2Top-10 metaphors ranked order by their type-frequency
      • 3.2.1Happiness is plant
      • 3.2.2Happiness is light
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 14 February 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.00133.raj
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