Correlation between Conceptual Metaphors and Etymological Patterns of Emotion Concepts with a Cognitive Semantics Approach

This paper suggests the hypothesis that emotion concepts which show similarity in their metaphorical mappings also reveal etymological interrelations across languages. In order to test this hypothesis, the Persian Linguistic Database was searched with keywords of two lexical fields of anger and fear. Thus 899 metaphorical expressions for anger and 600 ones for fear were found. By comparing the names of the mappings of anger and fear metaphors, we found out that these emotion concepts share 17 similar names of the mappings. The etymological data gathered from more than 25 languages for these fields also confirmed etymological and lexical interrelations. Hence, it can be concluded that there are correlations between conceptual metaphors and etymological and lexical patterns of fear and anger. The results of this research may not be limited to these two emotion concepts; it is suggested that such correlations between metaphorical mappings and etymological and lexical patterns can be found between other emotion concepts.