LING 2003 Semantics: Meaning and Grammar LING 2003 Semantics Assignment 2 2010241080 Yan, Yan Hao Nam

(1) I need to let my feelings out. (2) She was steaming with resentment. (3) The students were burning with rage. (4) The boss unleashed her anger at the meeting. (5) The news warmed our spirits. (6) The teachers response cooled his enthusiasm. (i) How are the emotions concerned expressed in English? What semantic concepts are needed to account for the use of words in these sentences? Most of the emotions concerned in the six examples are expressed in a way of metaphor. In (1), feelings is related to something fluid or something like liquid, which can be let out. In (2), resentment is in some ways synonymous to rage or anger, which both involve feeling hot or high temperature when we possess these emotions. However, compared with the latter two resentment may be a more internally expressed emotion, i.e., it may not be shown on ones faces but somehow be stored in ones heart. Therefore it is less vigorous in degree, so steaming is used with resentment, which sounds more moderate than either burning or unleash. In (3), rage is related to fire. This metaphorical relationship can be rationalized by the mean that when we consider fire we are reminded of hot and red: the prior is the sensation that we may have whenever we feel enraged, and the later indeed resembles the colour of our face whenever we feel angry. There is also a sense of comparison to resentment, as described previously, anger or rage is a more externally expressed emotions, and burning may involve a higher temperature than steaming (physically water becomes steam at 100 degree Celsius, while burning can be of a far higher degree). Therefore it is reasonable to relate rage to burning. In (4), anger is analogized as a bomb, which may release and unrestraint the stored energy. Both bomb and anger have similar natures, such as the accumulative, explosive and harmful nature, as anger may not come all at a sudden, but have to be stored from time to time, just like a bomb, which both may not explode until something or someone triggered them. And when they explode, they often cause harm to others. The bomb may cause physical harm, while anger may more likely cause mental or emotional harm to others. This verb-noun combination indeed makes the interpretation of the abstract idea anger more concrete and comprehendible. In (5), warmed our spirits can resemble the real world experience or sensation that when we are embraced, we can feel warm physically as well as emotionally meaning that we feel secured and comfortable. Spirits here can refer to the emotional sense, and thus our spirits can be warmed as if we are embraced.

LING 2003 Semantics: Meaning and Grammar In (6), enthusiasm can often be related to passionate, or hot-blooded. When we become enthusiastic, we tend to become hot-blooded and may want to work immediately. This may be similar to the case when we at burn, we may move uncontrollably due to the high temperature. However, it can be stopped by reducing the temperature, that is, cooling it down. Therefore the expression cool down the enthusiasm can effectively infer the meaning of reducing ones enthusiasm. All these 6 examples indeed apply the ideas of metaphors. As stated in Riemer (2010), metaphors assert a resemblance between two entities, and to understand the meaning of the metaphorical utterance, people have to identify things [two entities] might hold in common. From the above examples, most of the expressions of emotions can resemble some natural phenomena which different individuals may have the same feeling towards them. Therefore, some concrete verbs are collocated with the abstract words of emotions. And hence a metaphorical correlation can be made between the two different entities and be made understandable to most English speakers. (ii) How are similar emotions expressed in Cantonese (or another language with which you are familiar)? Are similar and/or different semantic notions needed? The above six examples do have some similar counterparts in Cantonese. Sometimes similar verb-noun combinations are adopted, while in other time the meanings can be expressed via some special terms in Chinese known as the idioms or the proverbs (which typically consist of 4 characters). In (1), we have similar sentence in Chinese as , in which it coincides with the fluid nature of feelings in English. In (2), the idiom can be a substitute for streaming with resentment. The part can signify anger or resentment, while the predicate simulates the phenomenon that the steam goes up. In (3), burning in rage can be substituted by the idiom , in which the first character means anger or rage, and the remaining characters mean burning in fire. In (4), carries the meaning of unleash anger in Chinese. The verb and noun mean unleash and anger respectively in English. Noted that the verb can collocate with (energy) or (explosion). In (5), warmed our spirits has an equivalence in Chinese as . has the meaning of warming throughout, and has the meaning of heart. One particular note here is that in Chinese often carries the meaning of spirit as in English. In (6), in Chinese enthusiasm is also combined with verb related to temperature as it is done in English. In fact it is mostly because its Chinese translation can be literally translated into hot emotion, in which the first character is an adjective used to describe temperature. Therefore to give the meaning of cool down enthusiasm in Chinese it is possible to say

LING 2003 Semantics: Meaning and Grammar (). The verb here share a very similar meaning to cool down in English. From the above examples, it can be seen that in expressing these kinds of abstract emotions, similar concrete natural phenomena are exploited in helping the language users easily understand.

(iii) Based on your analysis, could there be semantic universals in this domain? From the above analysis, it is in fact possible for one to conclude that in some domains there could be a semantic universal, and expressions of emotions probably belong to one of these domains. There are two hypotheses that may be possible accounting for this universality. This can be explained by the fact that universally all humans can possess these common emotions like sadness, happiness, enthusiasm, anger and resentment. Representation of these emotions, when expressed visually via media like movies or pictures, almost is the same cross-culturally: someone who is angry will have fire burning himself / herself; someone who resent will have steam coming out from his head; someone who get hot-blooded or too enthusiastic may get drenched by a bucket of cool water, etc. If it is to say language is used to present entities in the real world verbally or in written form, then it is not surprising to see that cross-linguistically words with similar meanings are used to token similar emotions. Another hypothesis is that it is rather hard to use only these abstract words in any languages to concretely describe how the emotions actually are like (The arbitrary relationship between words and meanings as proposed by Saussure). In order to solve this problem, it is possible, as observed from the two languages above, to make use of the predicates like verbs and adjectives, which are obviously more concrete than the nouns, to promote understanding of the nouns. Lakoff and Johnson (1980, as stated in Riemer, 2010) propose that some concepts can have metaphorical structure the conceptual theory of metaphor. This theory focuses on metaphor as a cognitive device which acts as a model to express the nature of otherwise hard-to-conceptualize ideas certain concepts lack independent structure of their own. Therefore these vehicles are usually used to impose the structure of the targets. In a nutshell, semantic universal could be found in the domain of expressions of emotions, based on the hypotheses that languages are the visual and written representation of real world entitles, and emotions are depicted universally across cultures; and some concepts require metaphors for expressing the hard-to-conceptualize entities.

Reference Riemer, Nick. Introducing Semantics. 2010. Cambridge University Press.