ON THE ISSUE OF COMPARING REPRESENTATIONS METAPHORICAL (SUB)MODELS IN DIFFERENT LANGUAGES (USING THE EXAMPLE MODEL OF «THE EMOTION IS A LIVING BEING»)

Abstract

The article compares representations of metaphorical (sub) models of emotional states in different languages, such as Russian, English, and German. The author focuses on the importance of metaphors in the representation of emotional states and points out the insufficient research of the metaphorical model «EMOTION IS A LIVING BEING» in the context of the representation of emotions. The main purpose of the work is to identify common and different features in the implementation of the metaphorical model «EMOTION IS A LIVING BEING». We have considered six emotions (fear, sadness, surprise, disgust, joy, anger), which scientists define as primary.

The main research methods include descriptive and comparative, linguistic modeling, corpus analysis, and the cluster approach. The latter implies that each «cluster» is formed based on a prototypical scenario that combines all the emotions included in it. The study, based on dictionary entries and corpus data from the National Corpus of the Russian Language, British National Corpus, Digitales Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache and Sketch Engine, revealed that metaphorical models are a reasonably productive means of representing emotional states. The analysis of the linguistic material showed that within the framework of the metaphorical model «EMOTION IS A LIVING BEING» in all the languages under consideration, several submodels can be distinguished: «EMOTION IS A PERSON / ANIMAL», «EMOTION IS AN ANIMAL» and «EMOTION IS A PLANT». Nevertheless, within the framework of the same metaphorical model, there is a difference in semantic roles: emotion can act as a Patient in Russian, whereas in English and German, it performs the function of an Agent.

The study's theoretical significance lies in the fact that the analysis of metaphors of emotions in various languages allows us to identify universal and unique aspects of the perception of emotions and make a particular contribution to the theory of metaphors. This research has practical value for creating an electronic multilingual database of metaphorical models.