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)

Caroline Gevaert: "The ANGER IS HEAT question" (2005)

In defense of Geeraerts and Gondelaers' (1995) hypothesis about the historical origin of the ANGER IS HEAT metaphor, Caroline Gevaert examines some Old English corpus material and concludes that the metaphor was indeed in all likelihood inherited from Latin scholarship.

As a part of her argument, she acknowledges that test subjects' body heat increases slightly (about .1 degree celsius) when they make an angry face, apparently supporting a physiological basis for ANGER IS HEAT. However, she then comments that this temperature increase also occurs when subjects mimic other emotions, suggesting that I was boiling with sadness should be equally natural (p. 197).

She also notes that the evidence from Chinese actually seems to contradict the theory, referring only to chilies (and, presumably, their red color) and not to heat or flames (p. 196). The Native American language Chikasaw similarly does not seem to support the hypothesis.