The role of the body in descriptions of emotions

A typology of the Australian continent

Bibliographic Data

ID20484336
AuthorsMaïa Ponsonnet (0000-0002-8879-9798, The University of Western Australia), Kitty-Jean Laginha (Macquarie University)
Year2020
Volume27
Issue1
Pages20-82
Publication date2020-12-31
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenuePragmatics & Cognition (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0929-0907 • E-ISSN: 1569-9943
PublisherJohn Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1075/pc.00011.pon
OpenAlexW3201020507
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited60

This article presents the first systematic typological study of emotional expressions involving body parts at the scale of a continent, namely the Australian continent. The role of body parts in figurative descriptions of emotions, a well-established phenomenon across the world, is known to be widespread in Australian languages. This article presents a typology of body-based emotional expressions across a balanced sample of 67 languages, where we found that at least 30 distinct body parts occur in emotional expressions. The belly is by far the most frequent, and a dozen others also have significant representation. The study shows how the properties of these body parts – e.g., whether they are internal organs or visible facial parts – partly determine which historical scenarios led to their linguistic associations with emotions, and in turn, their semantic and figurative properties

Cognitive psychology · Dozen · Epistemology · Linguistic typology · Linguistics · Literal and figurative language · Metaphor · Phenomenon · Sociology · Typology · Anthropology · Categorization, perception, and language · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Mathematics · Multisensory perception and integration · Philosophy · Psychology

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