Publications

Publication details [#1742]

Aksan, Mustafa. 2007. 'A jar of nerves': Anger metaphors and construal of an emotion in Turkish.

Abstract

Anger appears in all lists of basic emotions, implying its centrality and universality. Among the languages that have a "word" for anger is Turkish, and the Turkish anger lexicon displays significant differences alongside unexpected overlaps with the emotion lexicons of Indo-European languages. Roughly put, the culture has a unique status in the sense that it is both Western (individualistic) and Eastern (collectivistic) simultaneously. This duality has been noted in many studies on culture and self, and it is possible to find translation equivalents of many trait adjectives of Indo-European languages in an Altaic language. Like other emotions, anger also comprises components that interact in complex ways. In the lexicalization of the anger script (Wierzbicka 1999), the Turkish anger expressions focus more on the reaction/behaviour component (like Japanese) rather than the evaluation component (like English) (Aksan 2005). This partly follows from the fact that anger is associated with force more than other emotion. The basic-level metaphors of anger identified for American-English (Lakoff 1987; Lakoff and Kövecses 1987) are also found in Turkish, and in the majority of cases, with exactly the same lexemes in the source domains. ANGER IS THE HEAT OF A FLUID IN A CONTAINER is expressed by sub-metaphors and metonymies. The head, blood, and the eyes may heat up. 'Jar', the container' that holds the hot fluid, also holds the nerves which embody the emotion. (Mustafa Aksan)