Afterthoughts on "The ANGER IS HEAT question"

Based on articles by Kövecses (2000), Yu (1995), and Taylor and Mbense (1995), Caroline Gevaerts gives the following report on the existence of heat metaphors for anger in languages other than English:

	HEAT	FIRE	FLUID
English	+	+	+
Hungarian	+	?	+
Japanese	+	+	+
Chinese	(–)	+	–
Zulu	+	+	(–)
Wolof	+	+	+
Chickasaw	+	?	–

It's difficult to say what to conclude from this table. Hungarian is definitely a biased pick, since Hungary has has a centuries-long exposure to Christian doctrines and scholarship. We should thus expect it to reflect the same humoral theory as English.

Chinese is, as Gevaerts notes, apparently a counterexample to the theory. The central metaphor, ANGER AS HEAT, does not seem to occur.

Anyway, here's my to-do list for today:

1. Finish research on blindness, deafness, and physical disability
2. Make a list of the arguments I've written so far and think about the ordering
3. Contact the two corpus linguists that Martin put me in contact with
4. Read some more of Feldman's From Molecule to Metaphor (2006)