Old English emotion is temperature: Cultural influences on a universal experience

Abstract

In recent years, the study of emotion metaphors and metonymies has broadened our understanding of how people conceptualise and verbalise their emotional experiences. While some emotion source domains appear to be culture-specific, others are widely employed to denominate the same emotion. One of these potentially universal source domains, temperature, appears to be widely used by speakers from different areas to derive figurative expressions for positive and negative emotions. However, the systematic study of this emotion source domain remains uncharted territory, and numerous fundamental questions about the relations between emotions and temperature remain untouched. This study aims at approaching the question of whether, and to what extent, the motif emotion is temperature illustrates the existence of a universalist embodiment model or, on the contrary, it is a result of historical and cultural variation. With this aim, using cognitive semantic methodology, I will scrutinize the complete corpus of Old English texts (850-1100) to provide a fine-grained analysis of the expressions for positive emotions rooted in the source domain high body temperature used by Old English authors. Generally speaking, this source domain indicates negative experience, which is why it has normally been studied in the context of negative (and, in consequence, unpleasant) emotional experiences. However, as the findings of this study show, the existence in Old English of the conceptual mapping positive emotion is high body temperature challenges our previous understanding of temperature metaphors as a product of universal embodiment, thus contributing to the current debate on metaphors as culture loaded expressions.