Talk at the workshop "The Study of Emotions in Greek Culture"
Fecha de publicación: 29-jul-2013 20:34:19
A. Chaniotis' ERC Advanced Grant, Emotions: The Greek Paradigm. May 17-18, 2013, U. Oxford
Cognitive Patterns in Greek Emotion Metaphors
Thinking and talking about emotion is one of the biggest challenges of the human mind. At the same time, human beings are prone to becoming emotionally involved in fictional mental simulations, often contradictory with our everyday experience. How do we integrate feelings with what is not affective per se—e.g. love with an arrow hitting a target—to create new ways of experiencing our emotions? This project is part of a long-term initiative to investigate what combinations of conceptual materials are the most successful for communicating emotion in verbal art, to what extent these conceptual recipes are shared by non-poetic usages and by non-verbal representations, and what in these patterns is based on cognition, what on culture, and what on factors related to communication, such as rhetorical goals, relevance, styles, or genres.
Greek emotion metaphors constitute an inexhaustible source of case studies for this endeavour. The vast diachrony of Greek culture offers unique possibilities to study how these conceptual templates evolve through time, and how their cognitive recipes are instantiated in a variety of ways in distant cultural settings. So far, much of the research on emotion metaphors, a burgeoning field in cognitive linguistics, has been carried out through corpus studies and the theoretical examination of isolated expressions. While these methods can offer interesting insights, they can by no means replace the philological and historical analysis of culturally situated examples. To illustrate the methods of my project, this talk compares a variety of instantiations of the same conceptual template in ancient Greek poetry. To enlarge the diachronic span and make the pattern more robust, some modern Greek texts are also analyzed.
In Greek poetry from Antiquity to our days, the experience of falling in love, or of sexual attraction, has often been integrated with a schematic spatial story in which an emitter emits something towards a receiver. Upon reception of the thing emitted, the receiver suffers emotional consequences. The result is a mental simulation in which erotic passion is directly caused by means of the emission schema. This fictional micro-world incorporates selected elements from both components, and creates emergent meanings of its own, such as a human body that emits a light with erotic power:
τὰς δὲ Θεοξένου ἀκτῖνας πρὸς ὄσσων
μαρμαρυζοίσας δρακείς
ὃς μὴ πόθῳ κυμαίνεται, ἐξ ἀδάμαντος
ἢ σιδάρου κεχάλκευται μέλαιναν καρδίαν
ψυχρᾷ φλογί…
But he who sees the glowing
rays flashing from Theoxenus’ eyes,
and is not shaken by waves of desire,
has a black heart of steel or iron
forged with a cold flame…
(Pindar. Snell & Maehler 123)
Variation in the realization of the pattern crucially relies on assigning the role of the emitter to the loved person or to an external agent, and on the instantiation of the emission image schema, like light, wind, or an object. Culture and context impose further constraints that can be studied systematically.
The many available theories of metaphor, including Conceptual Metaphor Theory by Lakoff & Johnson, cannot adequately account for the conceptual complexity of this pattern, neither explain the appearance of emergent meanings, that is, novel conceptual elements not present in any of the components of the poetic image. The main problem is that these theories regard metaphor as the result of transfer from one domain to another. This prevents us from considering the metaphoric meaning as a new whole.
To analyze this and other patterns across different periods of Greek poetry, I use a more flexible model for meaning construction: Fauconnier and Turner’s Blending Theory. I also rely on recent research on the embodiment of concepts, that is, the grounding of complex notions, not clearly delineated in our experience, on basic spatial gestalts, also known as image schemas.
Figurative language gives us precious information about an author’s thought, as well as about the cultural background of a text. The study of patterns in figurative language also produces insights about mind and culture in general. This is especially relevant for the comparative study of emotion concepts, since the expression of affect is a constant challenge to poets and everyday speakers alike. Emotional experiences are hard to conceptualize, and often need to be integrated with materials from other domains, such as spatial relations. The comparative study of the most creative examples of such integrations, the ones that we find in poetic imagery, sheds light on the cognitive processes underlying the construction of affective meaning. This type of study also gives us the opportunity to contrast how texts from different periods exploit the same conceptual recipe, to serve their particular cultural, poetic and communicative purposes. The twenty-eight centuries of Greek literature provide an immense living laboratory for examining the interplay of the cognitive and cultural processes at work in emotion metaphors.