Semantic and conceptual analysis of figurative expressions of emotions

In this paper, I propose a corpus-based approach to the investigation of conceptual and semantic aspects in the field of linguistic expression of emotional concepts, in particular the near-synonymous target domains worry & anxiety and euphoria & excitement. As pioneering linguists in the area of cognitive linguistics (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, Kövecses 2000) have established in their theory of the conceptual metaphor (CMT), human use and understanding of metaphorical language is governed predominantly by non-literal correspondences that structure people's concepts (Lakoff&Johnson 1980: 7). These conceptual metaphors are claimed to be grounded principally in bodily experience, an assertion that is essentially relevant to the domain of emotions. Given that it is assumed that abstractions are predominantly conceptualized via concrete terminology, this study aims to investigate this supposition by quantitatively comparing metaphorical patterns and expressions of the aforementioned emotion nouns.