1 VIET NAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HA NOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGE & INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST – GRADUATE STUDIES ***************** NGUYỄN THỊ THƠM THE MEANINGS OF THE NOUN LOVE IN SOME ENGLISH EXPRESSIONS (FROM COGNITIVE SEMANTICS PERSPECTIVE) (TÌM HIỂU Ý NGHĨA CỦA DANH TỪ LOVE TRONG MỘT SỐ CỤM TỪ TRONG TIẾNG ANH XÉT TỪ GÓC ĐỘ NGỮ NGHĨA HỌC TRI NHẬN) M.A. Minor Programme Thesis Field: English Linguistics Code: 60 22 15 Hanoi - 2010 2 VIET NAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HA NOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGE & INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST – GRADUATE STUDIES ***************** NGUYỄN THỊ THƠM THE MEANINGS OF THE NOUN LOVE IN SOME ENGLISH EXPRESSIONS (FROM COGNITIVE SEMANTICS PERSPECTIVE) (TÌM HIỂU Ý NGHĨA CỦA DANH TỪ LOVE TRONG MỘT SỐ CỤM TỪ TRONG TIẾNG ANH XÉT TỪ GÓC ĐỘ NGỮ NGHĨA HỌC TRI NHẬN) M.A. Minor Programme Thesis Field: English Linguistics Code: 60 22 15 Supervisor: Dr. Hà Cẩm Tâm Hanoi - 2010 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Acknowledgement…………………………………………………………………………… i Certificate of originality of study project report……………………………………………… ii Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………… iii Table of contents……………………………………………………………………………….iv PART I: INTRODUCTION ………………………………………………………………… 1 1. Rationale 1 2. Aims of the study 2 3. Scope of the study 3 4. Research question 3 5. Organization of the study 3 PART II: DEVELOPMENT 4 CHAPTER 1: THEORITICAL BACKGROUND 4 1.1. Cognitive semantics 4 1.2. Cognitive metaphor theory 5 1.2.1. Structural metaphors 6 1.2.2. Orientational metaphors 12 1.2.3. Ontological metaphors 13 1.3. Image schemas 15 1.4. Collocation 16 1.5. The notion love in English 17 CHAPTER 2: THE STUDY 20 2.1. Research question 20 2.2. Data collection 20 2.3. Analytical framework 20 2.3.1. Love is a container 21 2.3.2. Love is a journey 21 2.3.3. Love is a fluid in a container 21 2.3.4. Love is madness 21 2.3.5. Love is insanity 21 7 2.3.6. Love is rapture 22 2.3.7. Love is natural/ physical forces 22 2.3.8. Love is fire/ heat 22 2.3.9. Love is a nutrient 22 2.3.10. Love is a valuable commodity (in an economic exchange) 23 2.3.11. Love is a social superior and opponent 23 2.3.12. Love is a patient 23 2.3.13. Love is war 23 2.3.14. Love is a captive animal 23 2.3.15. Love is a unity (of two complementary parts) 23 2.3.16. Love is a hidden object 24 2.3.17. Love is magic 24 2.3.18. Love is a plant 24 2.3.19. Love is a collaborative work of art 24 2.4. Data analysis and discussion 24 2.4.1. Love is a container 25 2.4.2. Love is fire/ heat 27 2.4.3. Love is a social superior and opponent 27 2.4.4. Love is a valuable commodity 29 2.4.5. Love is natural/ physical forces 30 2.4.6. Love is a fluid in a container 31 2.4.7. Love is a journey 31 2.4.8. Love is a nutrient 33 2.4.9. Love is rapture 34 2.4.10. Love is insanity 35 2.4.11. Love is a unity (of two complementary parts) 35 PART III: CONCLUSION 37 1. Major findings 37 2. Implications 38 3. Suggestions for further study 39 REFERRENCES…………………………………………………………………………………… 40 APPENDIX…………………………………………………………………………………… I 8 PART I: INTRODUCTION 1. Rationale Language is a means to express people‟s thought. It is also used to express people‟s emotions, feelings including love, hate, anger, etc. In Talmy‟s view, language is a major cognitive system in its own right, distinct from the other major ones: perception, reasoning, affect, attention, memory, cultural structure, and motor control. As such, language has some structural properties that are uniquely its own and some others that are in common either with only a few other cognitive systems, or with all other cognitive systems (Talmy, 2000a: 16). In recent years, the study of emotions has been one of the most important areas of research in the Social Sciences. Expressing love is not an easy task and different languages may have different conventions. In our daily life love is an important emotion. Love is not clearly defined in our experience and may be inconceivable without using metaphors (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980: 85). Love, as well as other feeling and emotions, is quite an abstraction. It is difficult for us, if not impossible, to comprehend these concepts without metaphor. According to Lakoff, we conceptualized the more abstract concept in terms of more concrete, “the non-physical in terms of the physical” (Lakoff, 1980: 59). This present study investigates the concept of love in some English set expressions. The theory of metaphor from the point of view of cognitive linguistics (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Lakoff & Turner, 1989; Lakoff, 1993, 1987; Kovecses, 2002) is adopted in this study. This new approach on metaphor states that metaphor is a process of understanding our world, particularly those abstract concepts such as love which are often expressed in terms of more concrete ones. Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 7) point out that: “Since metaphorical expressions in our language are tied to metaphorical concepts in a systematic way, we can use expressions to study the nature of metaphorical concepts and to gain an understanding of the metaphorical nature of our activities.” The metaphorical concept Love is a journey is reflected in contemporary English through a wide variety of expressions (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980: 44-45): LOVE IS A JOURNEY Look how far we've come. We're at a crossroads. We may have to go our separate ways. We‟re stuck. 9 It's been a long, bumpy road. This relationship is a dead-end street. We're spinning our wheels. The marriage is on the rocks. Our relationship is off the track. In the above examples, love is structured by the concept of a journey. These everyday English expressions are used for reasoning about love. The metaphor can be understood as a mapping exercise from a source domain (in this case, journeys) to a target domain (in this case love). Entities in the domain of love correspond systematically to entities in the domain of a journey (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980: 207-208). Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 29) claim that “…most of our non-physical reality is structures, understood, and created by metaphors…” We come to know our thoughts and feelings by analogy to the physical world. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) proposed that metaphor was a basis structure of understanding through which we conceptualize on domain (the target domain which is unfamiliar or abstract) in terms of another (the source domain, most often familiar and concrete). In short, the conceptual metaphor of love is conventional in different languages, so I applied the theory of conceptual metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Lakoff & Turner, 1989; Lakoff, 1993, 1987; Kovecses, 2002) to the study of recognition of metaphors of love in some English expressions of love. It is expected that this study will provide invaluable understanding of correspondence between the domain of love experience and another domain of experience. 2. Aims of the study The present study aims at studying the conceptualization of the noun love in some English expressions of love. The qualities of love are identified in English based on analyzing the data under the study. 3. Scope of the study This study focuses on investigating how love is conceptualized in English evidenced in 115 English expressions of love. There are three different categories according to the function of metaphors: Structural, orientaitonal, and ontological metaphors (Kovecses, 2002: 32, 33). In this study, structural metaphors was used as the analytical framework. 10 4. Research question The question addressed in this study is: - How is love conceptualized in English evidenced in some English expressions of love? 5. Organization of the study The study comprises 3 parts. Part I provides the significance, aims, framework, scope and organization of the study. Part II is subdivided into 2 chapters: Chapter 1 provides the general theoretical background of the study and Chapter 2, the backbone of the study. It provides the data collection, the analytical framework and data analysis. Part III demonstrates the major findings of the study, implications and suggestions for further cognitive studies. Appendix and references are also included. 11 PART II: DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 1: THEORITICAL BACKGROUND In this study, cognitive semantics, especially the theory of cognitive metaphor is the main interest which provides gateways for the understanding and analysis of linguistics expressions containing the word love which are the object of the study. This chapter explores the field of cognitive semantics, thus enabling the writer to provide a thorough theoretical framework or background for the study. 1.1. Cognitive semantics A new semantic theory, called cognitive semantics, has been developed (Lakoff, 1987; Langacker, 1986, 1987; Croft and Cruse, 2004; Evans, 2006). The prime slogan for cognitive semantics is: Meanings are in the head. More precisely, semantics for a language is seen as a mapping from the expressions of the language to some cognitive or mental entities. Langacker (1986a: 3) formulates it crisply: “Meaning is equated with conceptualization.” This paradigm of semantics is thus conceptualistic or cognitivistic. It rejects the formal traditions of attributing linguistics into phonology, syntax, pragmatics, etc., and that the meaning is independent from syntax. Moreover, cognitive semantics states that meanings come from our mind; or rather, meanings are in the head (Gardenfors, 1994). An important tenet of cognitive semantics is that the structures in our heads that are carrying the meanings of words are of the same nature as those that are created when we perceive- when we see, hear, touch, etc. different things. (Gardenfors, 2007: 58). Cognitive semantics is concerned with investigating the relationship between experience, the conceptual system, and the semantic structure encoded by language. In specific terms, scholars working in cognitive semantics investigate knowledge representation (conceptual structure), and meaning construction (conceptualization). Cognitive semanticists have employed language as the lens through which these cognitive phenomena can be investigated. Consequently, research in cognitive semantics tends to be interested in modeling the human mind as much as it is concerned with investigating linguistic semantics (Vyvyan, 2007). Cognitive semantics has established close ties between semantics and cognition. Cognitive semantics as a multi-disciplinary theory of language attempts to describe language phenomena from a cognitive, cultural and physiological point of view taking into account the sociological and anthropological differences as well as the experiential realisms and natural surroundings that are embodied. A major question in cognitive semantics research is how 12 different languages and cultures utilize the resource in the language system (the grammar and lexicon) to construe the world. Thus, the use of cognitive semantics as an approach to human discourse seen through underlying conceptual schema patterns could be significant an understanding cross-cultural communication. Cognitive semantics, in general, agrees that there are universal as well as language specific construal. For instance, Asmah (1996) and Yu (2003) have found that the conceptualization and metaphorisation of the body is influenced by and interacts with the folk cultural elements in society. Kovecses (1999) also agrees that the conceptualization of the body and body parts is in the large part culture-specific with several universal conceptual structures at the categorical and schematic level. 1.2. Cognitive metaphor theory The Cognitive Theory of Metaphor - initiated by Reddy‟s (1979) study on the “conduit metaphor”- had been developed mainly by Lakoff, Johnson and their colleagues (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Lakoff, 1987, 1993; Lakoff &Turner, 1989). It met with wide response. It is also called Conceptual Metaphor Theory. It is one of the first products of cognitive semantics. Conceptual Metaphor Theory is an area of research which deals with the concept of metaphorical language. Conceptual metaphors pervade our thoughts and are reflected through our language. Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 3) state that: "Our conceptual system is not something we are normally aware of. In most of the little things we do everyday, we simply think and act more or less automatically certain lines. Just what these lines are is by no means obvious. One way to find out is by looking at language.” Lakoff and Johnson (1980) pointed out that the concepts that govern our thoughts govern our everyday functioning. Our concepts structure what and how we perceive and experience the world. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities. If we are right in suggesting that our conceptual system is largely metaphorical, then the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor. They (1980) also identify metaphor as a transfer between the source domain and the target domain. This has become known as the “two-domain theory” of metaphor. The cognitive view on metaphor regards it as cognitive mechanism whereby one conceptual domain (source domain) is partially mapped, that is, projected, onto another conceptual domain (target domain). The target domain (abstract conceptual reality) is then understood in 13 terms of the source domain (physical reality). According to Lakoff (1994: 43), metaphor is thus “a cross-domain mapping in the conceptual system”. Let‟s look at the examples: Life is difficulty. Love is a journey. Argument is war. Anger is a hot fluid in a container. As we can see in the examples above, life, love, argument and anger are target domain, while difficulty, journey, war and a hot fluid in a container are source domain (Kovecses, 2002: 6). In order to understand the target domain in terms of source domain, we have to have appropriate knowledge of the source domain (Lakoff & Turner, 1989: 60). To sum up, according to Lakoff and Johnsons‟ research (1980), from everyday expressions we know that most of our concepts are partially understood in terms of other concepts and that most of human beings‟ normal conceptual system is metaphorical. Lakoff and Johnson identify three types of metaphors: structured, orientational and ontological. In the following sections, a brief discussion of each type of metaphor will be outlined. 1.2.1. Structural metaphors According to Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 40) state that structural metaphor refers to a conceptual metaphor that is constructed from one conceptual structure to another. In other words, in the structural metaphor model, one concept is understood and expressed in terms of another structured, sharply defined concept. With the help of the structural metaphor, we can use the words concerning one concept to talk about another concept. For instance, war is a concept that is frequently mapped onto the target domain such as argument. As we know war is a concrete concept that we are very familiar with, so we often talk about argument in terms of war. Moreover, we also know that war is a very complex process that involves plan, attack, defense, counterattack, fight, win, lose, truce, etc., while argument is complex and abstract concept. As a result, the knowledge of war can be used to talk about the unknown abstract concepts. These metaphors are the most clearly perceived. Let‟s consider the examples (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980: 4) below because this kind of metaphor is reflected in our everyday language by a wide variety of expressions: ARGUMENT IS WAR [...]... study, the conceptualization of love in English, 2.1 Research questions The question below is the heart of the study: - How is love conceptualized in English evidenced in some English expressions of love? 2.2 Data collection In this analysis which follows, I concentrate on the basic noun love in some set expressions The metaphors containing the word love in expressions are especially typical, while the. .. represented in the order of the most frequent use to the low frequent use of the expressions in the data 2.4.1 Love is a container According to the table (1), there were 23 metaphorical lexical units that represent the Love is a container metaphor As we can see in the data, Love is a container metaphor is most pervasive in the total of 115 English expressions of love In the expressions, love is conceptualized... commodity In the love relationship, when the two persons are in love, they do not concern the substantial conditions The only thing they concern is the love They believe that the strength of love helps them do many things There is the difference between the two languages in representing love as a commodity In English, the conceptualization of love as a valuable commodity is represented in many expressions. .. participants of marital love (storge-eros) are spouses This love occurs in the participant domain of marriage (c) The participants of sexual love (eros) are (potential) lovers This love occurs in the participant domain of sexuality (d) The participants of friendship love (philia) are neither members of the same family, spouses of one another, or (potential) lovers, but this love occurs in the domain of friendship,... 1986) Love is represented as mental illness, such that the person causing the insanity represents the person with whom one is in love, the insane person represents the person in love, and the insane behavior represents the behavior of the person in love. ) The behavior of the person affected by the emotion usually is very similar to the behavior of an insane person Insanity is the ultimate lack of control... Unity is the state of being or joining together When finding love, living somebody, or being in a relationship is what makes a human being a complete entity (57) Their knot of love (58) Religion is one with love The meaning of a unity is understood when love is combined with the words like tear, one, knot, or twin The word “knot” in example (57) represents the love relationship as a fastening tie which... nhau In these examples, love makes the lovers insensible (mê mẩn) and their minds are irrational (hao mòn) According to the expressions, we can see that the two languages represent the same conceptualization of love as insanity 2.4.11 Love is a unity (of two complementary parts) In the table (1), there were 5 metaphorical expressions of love included in the conceptual metaphor Love is a unity (of two... rapture; Love is a nutrient; and Love is a unity (of two complementary parts) These conceptual metaphors are arranged from mapping at the most frequent use to the low frequent use of the English expressions of love in the analysis Table (1) below presents the specific number of each conceptual metaphor of love evidenced in 115 English expressions of love Table 1: Conceptualizations of love in 115 English. .. forever In many expressions, the word “fall” appears It indicates an unintended and accident event Whenever the lovers fall in the love container, they may stay there forever However, if it is not a true love, they will fall from the enclosed place illustrated in example (2) 31 A more specific version of the container metaphor is indicated in example (4), where the container seems to be a kind of labyrinth... rồi.” In this case, it can be objectively concluded that English and Vietnamese have the difference in expressing love In English, love is conceptualized as a container In contrast, it is not the same conceptualization in Vietnamese 2.4.2 Love is fire/ heat In the table (1), there were 16 English metaphorical expressions of love included in the conceptual metaphor Love is fire/ heat In this metaphor love . THE MEANINGS OF THE NOUN LOVE IN SOME ENGLISH EXPRESSIONS (FROM COGNITIVE SEMANTICS PERSPECTIVE) (TÌM HIỂU Ý NGHĨA CỦA DANH TỪ LOVE TRONG MỘT SỐ CỤM TỪ TRONG TIẾNG ANH XÉT TỪ GÓC ĐỘ NGỮ. (FROM COGNITIVE SEMANTICS PERSPECTIVE) (TÌM HIỂU Ý NGHĨA CỦA DANH TỪ LOVE TRONG MỘT SỐ CỤM TỪ TRONG TIẾNG ANH XÉT TỪ GÓC ĐỘ NGỮ NGHĨA HỌC TRI NHẬN) M.A. Minor Programme Thesis. conceptualization of the noun love in some English expressions of love. The qualities of love are identified in English based on analyzing the data under the study. 3. Scope of the study This