Universal and Culture-Specific Conceptualization of Anger in Russian

Abstract

1. Introduction

Emotion concept used to be treated as an arbitrary and irrational semantic domain escaping any linguistic research. Considering that emotion is fundamentally introspective concept only accessible to the experiencing subject and is basically culture-dependent concept(Russell 1991), it is understandable that emotion concept has long been an alienated subject matter in linguistic semantics. Only through cognitive approach to language and conceptual metaphor theory, emotion concepts came to be accounted for as having coherent semantic substance. Köecses and Lakoff's pioneering research on 'anger' in English(Lakoff 1987) shows how emotionality and rationality are not mutually exclusive and how emotion concepts are experientially grounded. Through cognitive approach to language and emotion concept, the traditional reason-emotion binarism and cognition-affect dichotomy came to be reexamined.1)