MIND, LANGUAGE AND METAPHOR
EUROCONFERENCE ON CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE IMAGINATION
THE “HEAT” METAPHOR IN THE CONCEPTUALIZATION OF ANGER IN ENGLISH AND SPANISH
Introduction
In my work I will attempt a description of the differences in the metaphorical
articulation of the emotion concept ANGER in English and Spanish. From the
many existent metaphors I will be focusing on the linguistic expressions that
instantiate the HEAT metaphor, a specificaction of the EMOTION IS
FIRE/HEAT metaphor, defined by Kövecses as a specific level FORCE
metaphor (Kövecses, 2000). I generically call the HEAT metaphor what is
indeed a cluster of metaphors around the notion “heat”. As will be seen later,
there are at least two very productive metaphors that articulate the whole
system and from which a large number of other submetaphors can be derived.
ANGER IN ENGLISH AND SPANISH
Sources
Inventories of figurative descriptive expressions of anger in English (about 300
of them) and Spanish (about 250). Most of them conventional but also some
non-conventional expressions that exploit the conventional mappings.
As sources for our expressions we’ve used:
•introspection (all 10 members of the research team on cognitive linguistics at
the University of Murcia, Spain)
•previous woks (cognitive analyses)
•dictionaries
•search in e-books
•search in corpora (CREA for Spanish and Lexis-Nexis for English)
•two novels thematically related to anger (Spanish Como ser una mujer y no
morir en el intento, by Carmen Rico Godoy, and English Bridget Jones’s
Diary, by Helen Fielding)
IN COMMON (z) Peninsular Spanish seems to have the same
cognitive model that underlies the conceptualization of anger in
American English. Both languages share the same basic schematic
structure (a five-stage scenario), their metaphorical structure is
coherent with the FORCE metaphor as described by Kövecses
(2000), they have the same central metaphor for the system
(ANGER IS A HOT FLUID IN A PRESSURIZED CONTAINER),
they exhibit a similar set of metonymies giving rise to it, and the
same set of physiological effects giving rise to those metonymies.
DIFFERENCES:
œ language-specific submappings
 different degree of exploitation of shared mappings
ž choice of metaphor vs. metonymy for the conceptualization of
particular aspects of the emotion.
NOTE: in the examples
English
Spanish
conventional expressions
non-conventional expressions
“quotes from our sources”
word-by-word translation
ANGER IS FIRE
œ English “steam” and Spanish “frying”. There are no conventional
expressions in Spanish instantiating the “steam” mapping and we find none
in English that elaborates on “frying” as a metaphorical effect of anger.
 English low-intensity fire. English has a higher number of
conventional expressions that reveal anger as a low-intensity fire
(“smoulder” vs. “burn”, “simmer” vs. “boil”, “stew”). No equivalent
conventional expressions can be found in Spanish, where we need to make
use of more colorful ones that elaborate on those non-conventionally
exploited mappings.
z Boiling mappings. The “boiling fluid” can either be anger itself (“anger
is boiling inside me”/“la ira hervía en mi interior”, “bulle la ira”) or the
angry person’s blood (“you make my blood boil”/ “haces que me hierva la
sangre”). There also are expressions such as “you make me boil” or “Ana
hervía de indignación”, where it is the person affected by anger that is said
to boil, not the blood or the metaphorical anger-fluid inside. These
expressions can be explained as focus shifts via the conventional metonymy
WHOLE FOR PART (either the whole person for the contained fluidemotion –i.e. specific WHOLE-PART metaphor CONTAINER FOR
CONTENT- or the whole person for his/her blood)
1. boil/ simmer
4. stew
boil:
he was boiling mad, you make my blood boil, he almost reached the
boiling point
me hierve la sangre (my blood boils), Ana hervía de indignación (Ana was
boiling with indignation), “bulle la ira” (anger boils)
simmer:
he was simmering down, he was seething with anger,
hervir a fuego lento (boil with a low fire, to simmer)
don’t work yourself up into a stew, he was stewing
estaba cociéndose por dentro (he/she was stewing inside)
2. burn/ smoulder
burn:
he was consumed by anger, anger consumed him, he was all burned up,
burning rage, ignite
tus comentarios me queman la sangre (your comments make my blood
boil), me queman las cosas que dices (the things you say burn me),
smoulder:
get rid of that smoldering resentment, he had coals under his feet
aún podía sentir las brasas de su ira (still he/she could feel the scolds
of his/her anger), resquemor (quemar = burn, the ”re-burning”,
resentment)
5. fulminate
he fulminated against her
la fulminó con la mirada (he/she fulminated her with the look, he/she
fulminated against her “with the eyes”)
6. fry
me tienes frito con tus tontunas (you’ve got me fried with your silly things,
I’m fed up with your silly things), estar frito (to be fried, to be fed up)
7. sparks
there are sparks flying between them, they struck sparks
estaba que echaba chispas (he was to throw sparks, he was fuming)
3. steam/ smoke
steam:
he’s just letting off steam, he’s blowing off steam
smoke:
I could see smoke coming out of his ears, he was fuming
echaba humo por las orejas (he was giving out smoke through the ears,
he was fuming),
ANGER IS A HOT FLUID IN A PRESSURIZED CONTAINER
PRESSURE (THE BODY IS A PRESSURIZED CONTAINER)
HEAT (ANGER IS HEAT)
z Positive/ negative evaluation. The PRESSURIZED CONTAINER metaphor can be further elaborated into what Kövecses has called the PRESSURE
œ Spanish “sulfurarse” (to “sulphonate oneself”). An angry person in Spanish can conventionally be referred to as a “sulphonated person”. English does not make
COOKER metaphor (2000:176 and ff). The traditional “cooking mappings” develop into the more modern elaboration of anger as pressure cooker (introducing
the PRESSURE aspect of the ANGER domain into the mapping). According to Kövecses this currently used metaphor only focuses on the negative aspects of
anger (violence, harm, loss of control), unlike the previous PRESSURIZED CONTAINER basic metaphor, which also allowed us to think of anger as a very
energetic state that we could use for good purposes (“be working out of anger, be fueled by anger”, [on anger] “people use it to empower thensleves in a positive
way”, “it – [anger] - can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change”).
The PRESSURE mappings, in whatever variant, explain the existence in Spanish of expressions such as “hinchar las narices” (swell the nose) (nose or –in vulgar
expressions- the male sexual organs), “henchido de ira” (swollen with anger) or “suprimir la ira” (“supress anger”).
use of this mapping. SULFUR is related to ANGER and HEAT through the concept LAVA. How? Lava, a fluid rich in sulfur, is conventionally mapped onto anger
in Spanish (special case of ANGER IS A HOT FLUID). Besides, volcanoes are considered “the chimneys of hell” and the HELL domain is also conventionally
mapped onto the ANGER one.
CONTAINER (THE BODY IS A CONTAINER)
BURST/EXPLOSION
z Two cognitive variants. THE LOSS OF CONTROL IS AN EXPLOSION/ A BURST.
- loss of of control as an explosion, closer to the FIRE metaphor (5-6)
- loss of control as a burst, closer to the PRESSURE metonymy (INTERNAL PRESSURE FOR ANGER) (7-8)
(5) He blew up
(6) Exploté (I blew up)
(7) He was bursting with anger, outbursts of fury
(8) Me revientan tus tontadas (your stupid things make me burst with anger)
œ English [LC] elaborations. Although the general BURST/EXPLOSION mapping exists in both languages, English seems to exploit this
metaphor more than Spanish does (English has more metaphorical elaborations). According to Lakoff and Kövecses (in Lakoff, 1987: 385):
- explosives: be on a short fuse, blow up
- electricity: blow a fuse
- pistons: blow a gasket
- volcanos: erupt
- bombs: that really set me off
Spanish does only make use of the explosives/bombs variants in conventional linguistic expressions: “estallar en insultos” (to blow off “in insults”),
“estoy que exploto” ( I’m about to explode), “tiene poca mecha” (he’ on a short fuse), etc. Volcanoes are a very specific case, since we have found
no conventional expressions, but creative ones such as “entró en erupción” (he/she erupted) that make use of this mapping. We could even find the
description of a real volcano eruption explained by the author as an anger outburst: “el ataque de ira (de un volcán)” (the anger attack of a volcano).
When the person explodes, parts of him go up in the air
 Pressure cooker. While frequent in English (“I blew my stack”, “I blew my top”, “she flipped her lid”, “he hit the ceiling”, “I went through the
roof”), Spanish linguistic conventional instantiations of this metaphorical entailment are rare. The only examples we’ve been able to find are “se
me voló la olla/la perola/ la bola” or “se me fue la olla/ la perola/ la bola” (flew from me the pot/ pan/ ball and went from me the pot/pan/ ball,
I flipped my lid). The upper parts of the body go up in the air as the result of pressure. But the mappings work somewhat differently in English and
Spanish. In both languages it is probably the head the body part that is conceived as going up in the air after the anger-explosion. In English,
though, the head seems to be conceptualized as the lid of a pressurized container, whereas in Spanish the pressurized container can be the head
itself, not the body. In this case the head is metaphorically viewed as the whole pressure cooker that goes up into the air because of the pressure (“se
me voló la olla/ la perola”). In some other expressions (result of a metonymic extension from this mapping) the head is not seen as a pressure
cooker, but as a ball (“se me fue la bola”), most probably due to its shape.
When a person explodes, what is inside him comes out
z The expression-of-anger stage and its motivation. This entailments focuses on the fourth stage of the anger scenario proposed by Lakoff and
Kövecses (in Lakoff, 1987: 386) : the loss of control and expression of anger. As Köveses noticed (1995:134) the fact that we are able to think of
emotions as something that can be expressed (i.e. “taken out”) is indeed related to our conceptualizing anger as a fluid in a pressurized container. In
fact, both in English and Spanish the word “expression” itself (“expresión” in Spanish) is coherent with the metaphorical entailment “when the
person explodes, what is inside him comes out”.
However, Kövecses suggests that “without conceptualizing anger as a (hot) fluid in a closed, pressurized container, we could not think of anger as
something that can be expressed (and controlled), that is, as something having an expressive part” (1995: 134). I believe the ANGER IS A (HOT)
FLUID IN A PRESSURIZED CONTAINER is responsible for our conceptualization of anger as something that can be literally ex-pressed, that is
propelled out of ourselves with violence as a result of an explosion. But our understanding of anger as something that can be “expressed” in the
modern sense of “having an expressive part” is the result of a more general metaphor, namely THE BODY IS A CONTAINER one. We only need
the INSIDE –OUTSIDE image schema present in the BODY CONTAINER metaphor to account for our understanding of emotions as something
that can be taken out of ourselves.
It is the PRESSURE aspect that is a result of the ANGER IS A FLUID IN A CONTAINER metaphor. To sum it up, the BODY CONTAINER
metaphor allows for the conceptualization of an expressing part in all emotions, and the FLUID IN A CONTAINER metaphor, by profiling this
expressive part, motivates its prototypical existence in an anger scenario.
Kövecses, Zoltán (1995) “The ‘container’ metaphor of anger in English, Chinese, Japanese and Hungarian”. In Zdravko Radman (ed) From a Metaphorical Point of View. A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Cognitive Content of Metaphor. Berlin and New
York: Walter de Gruyter.
----- (2000) Metaphor and Emotion. Cambridge; New York: Cambrige University Press.
Lakoff, George. (1987) Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
 Spanish “hinchar” (to swell). The ANGER IS A HOT FLUID IN A PRESSURIZED CONTAINER metaphor has a very important metaphorical entailment when
the container is conceptualized as closed: “intense anger produces pressure on the body-container” (Lakoff and Kövecses, in Lakoff, 1987: 385). Another possible
entailment is “intense anger makes the container grow bigger” (Kövecses, 1995: 124). There is evidence of the existence of this entailment in Spanish conventional
expressions related to “hinchar” (to swell, meaning “to annoy”). The swollen part is either the whole body (“me estás hinchando” -you’re swelling me) or
specifically the nose (“me estás hinchando las narices” -you’re swelling my nose). English can exploit this mapping too (e.g. “he is swelling with anger”), but it
doesn’t seem to be so linguistically conventionalized as it is in Spanish. Besides it can be applied to other emotions (e.g. “swelling with pride”), whereas Spanish
“hinchar” (used as a verb) is specific for anger only.
z Open and closed containers. In both languages, when anger increases and reaches the limit point, two things can happen (according to our conventional way of
representing it): anger can overflow (“desbordado por la ira” - with overflown anger) or break the container (“estallar” – to burst). The first mapping implies the
container is conceptualized as open, in the second mapping it is closed. In Spanish linguistic expressions dealing with “overflowing” are frequent and fully
conventionalized ones.
FLUID (ANGER IS A FLUID)
z Danger profiling. The anger-fluid can be a cold or a hot one. If hot, mappings are either related to cooking (specifically “boiling anger”, but also simmering,
stewing, steaming, etc projections) or burning (typically lava or scalding water). If not hot, anger is typically conceptualized as flooding waters. However we’ve
been able to find FLUID mappings that explain anger as a non-hot fluid and with no flooding effect (e.g. “anger . . . dripping down over this globe like a diseased
liquid”). In any case the profiled aspect is danger, which suggests that anger is conceptualized as a dangerous emotion. FIRE metaphors highlight the same idea and
so do many other mappings that structure the anger domain as well (wild animal, opponent, war, etc)
 Container filled up to different body parts. Increasing anger is viewed as a rising fluid in both languages. The vertical body-container gets filled up to
different parts, though: in English it is the nose (“get up someone’s nose”), in Spanish it can be the nose, the crown and the head on general (metonymically
activated by “moño” – bun): estoy hasta las narices/ la coronilla/ el moño (I’m –filled with anger?- up to the nose/ crown/bun).
RISING FLUID (when the intensity of anger increases, the fluid rises)
 English more conventional exploitation. Spanish hardly exploits the RISING mapping in conventional expressions. “Estoy hasta las
narices/ la coronilla/ el moño” (I’m –filled with anger?- up to the nose/ crown/bun) are the only conventional constructions that instantiate the
RISING mapping within the HEAT metaphor. However, we have found some creative expressions that may support the existence of this
mapping in Spanish, in spite of the limited conventional linguistic evidence. In English, on the contrary, we find a lot. E.g. “up” and “down”
expressions (“be burned up”, “keep anger bottled up within oneself”, “building up anger”, “cool down”, etc). This conceptualization of
increasing as rising (and the opposite) is conventional in the language in general thanks to the metaphors MORE IS UP and LESS IS DOWN.
Although they exist in Spanish too, this language does not typically make use of any UP/DOWN mappings to deal with an increase/decrease
in the intensity of anger. Unlike in English, in Spanish anger does not “rise” (1) or “go down” (2), it merely increases (3) or decreases (4):
(1) ? su ira subió (his/her anger rose )
(2) ? su ira bajó (his/her anger went down)
(3) mi ira crecía/aumentaba rápidamente (my anger was quickly increasing)
(4) mi ira disminuyó lentamente (my anger slowly decreased)
Cristina Soriano Salinas (University of Murcia – Spain)
csoriano@um.es