Osgood, Suci, and Tannenbaum: The Measurement of Meaning (1957)

Charles Osgood was a student of the psychologist Theodore Karwoski, who did a number of studies of synaesthesia between the 1930s and the 1950s. His own work partly continued this line, but also partly shifted the focus more explicitly to the expression of synaesthetic thought in language.

The Dimensions of Meaning

In this book, Osgood and his two coauthors thus use factor analysis to show that the actual dimensionality of semantic space is much smaller than the nominal, since there are strong correlations between oppositions such as up/down, good/bad, etc.

A test item used on one of the experiments reported in the book (p. 81).

In 1980, Osgood would summarize the findings as follows:

Happy is UP, COLORFUL, LIGHT, and CLEAR, but _sad_ is DOWN, COLORLESS, DARK and HAZY; heavy is DOWN, THICK, DARK, and LARGE, but light (weight having been specified) is UP, THIN, LIGHT and SMALL; excitement is VERTICAL, COLORFUL, CROOKED and SHARP, but _calm_ is HORIZONTAL, COLORLESS, STRAIGHT and BLUNT; woman is COLORFUL, THIN, (except for Mexicans), LIGHT, BLUNT and ROUNDED (except for Navajos), but man is (VERTICAL (woman tending to be HORIZONTAL), COLORLESS, THICK, DARK, SHARP and ANGULAR. These trends for four cultures suggest certain "universal" tendencies. (Quoted from the 1981 reprint, p. 59)

In the 1957 book, the authors explain:

 … it was found that, as used by our subjects in making their judgments, the semantic scales fell into highly intercorrelated clusters. For example, fair-unfair, high-low, kind-cruel, valuable-worthless, Christian-antiChristian, and honest-dishonest were all found to correlate together .90 or better. Such a cluster represents the operation of a single, general factor in social judgments, obviously here an evaluative factor. Scales like strong-weak, realistic-unrealistic, and happy-sad were independent of this evaluative group and pointed to the existence of other dimensions of the semantic framework. (pp. 24--25)

Funny how the metaphor "ANTICHRISTIAN IS DOWN" has escaped from the current literature on cognitive metaphor theory.

Watch the Music

Front cover of the book.

For his undergraduate thesis, Osgood had also studied a number of anthropological reports of "primitive man," coming to similar conclusions. He reports in the book that,

for example, good gods, places, social positions, etc., were almost always up and light (white), whereas bad things were down and dark (black). A prevalent myth tells how the gods helped the original man to struggle from the dark, cold, wet, sad world below the ground up to the light, warm, dry, happy world on the surface. (p. 23)

Given Osgood's background, all of these things of course had to be connected to synaesthesia:

It seems clear from these studies that the imagery found in synesthesia is intimately tied up with language metaphor, and that both represent semantic relations. (p. 23)

Or, more elaborately:

Whereas fast, exciting music might be pictured by the synesthete as sharply etched, bright red forms, his less imaginative brethren would merely agree that words like "red-hot," "bright," and "fiery," as verbal metaphors, adequately describe the music; a slow melancholic selection might be visualized as heavy, slow-moving "blobs" of somber hue and be described verbally as "heavy," "blue," and "dark." The relation of this phenomenon to ordinary metaphor is evident: A happy man is said to feel "high," a said man "low"; the pianist travels "up" and "down" the scale from treble to bass; souls travel "up" to the good place and "down" to the bad place; hope is "white" and despair is "black." (p. 21)

Metaphorical Grounding

They also proposed a genealogical explanation for these phenomena, essentially the same as the one given today by cognitive metaphor theorists once you strip away the behaviorist language:

Take the case of parallelism between auditory pitch and visual size (synesthetes typically represent high tones as small and low tones as large): it is characteristic for the physical world that large-sized resonators produce low frequency tones and small-sized resonators, high frequency tones (think of a series of organ pipes, bells, or even hollow logs and sticks, and of the voices of men vs. boys, large dogs vs. little dogs, or lions vs. mice). This means that repeatedly the visual stimulus of large objects will be paired with the auditory stimulus of low-pitched tones, and so on consistently throughout the continuum. Any representational processes associated with one (e.g., danger significance of threatening big dog vs. play significance of little dog) will tend to be associated with the other as well (e.g., sounds produced). This will a hierarchy of equivalent signs come to be associated with a common mediation process. Any encoding responses associated with this mediator, such as "large" drawing movements and saying the word "large," will tend to transfer to any sign which elicits this mediator — thus "synesthesia" when a deep tone produces "large" drawing movements and "metaphor" when the word "deep" is associated with the word "large." (p. 24)

Asch: "The Metaphor: A Psychological Inquiry" (1958)

The social psychologist Solomon Asch was interested in how we perceive, understand, and describe other people, and this let him (among other things) to conduct this small, cross-linguistic study on the polysemy of some common sensory adjectives.

He wanted to investigate whether the cross-modal ambiguity of English words like sharp was a language-specific coincidence, so he selected a set of promising terms and asked some informants what other meanings the corresponding word in their language could have.

Cutting the Cake

Asch presents his materials as follows:

Included among the terms were the following: warm, cold, hot; right, left; dull, bright, pale, shining; straight, twisted, crooked; sweet, bitter; colorful, colorless, white, black (and some other color terms); rought, smooth, slippery; dry, wet; clear, cloudy; deep, shallow, high, low; broad, rounded, sharp; hard, soft. (p. 88)

The languages he compared were ancient Hebrew, ancient Greek, "Chinese" (not further specified), Thai, Malayalam, Hausa, Burmese (p. 88).

The conclusion he came to was that "… all the languages examined here contain terms that simultaneously describe both physical and psychological qualities" (p. 89). However, he also warned about overextrapolating these findings:

From the linguistic evidence alone, even if it were more complete, we could not, of course conclude about the responsible operations. For this purpose we need a psychological analysis. (p. 91)

Solomon Asch with his wife Florence (from the Asch Center website).

Cognitive Operations

After having presented his results, Asch also speculates about the "conceptual basis" for this dual function of sensory words:

Dual terms may be the consequence of stable associative connections established between dissimilar physical and psychological  conditions that regularly share some stimulus properties. (p. 92)

The concepts in question have little in common with abstract logical operations. They are not generalizations of what is common to an array of different instances. Rather they are concrete cognitive operations in terms of which we naïvely comprehend events and similarities between them. (p. 93)

We see natural events as conductors of the same fundamental forces that we find in the human sphere. Therefore we speak spontaneously of seeing a point, of shedding light on or illuminating a problem, of penetrating to the heart of a matter. (p. 93)

The Schema of Interaction

Thus:

What now is the sense of hard when it refers to a person? It describes an interaction that is formally similar. We see a man refusing the appeal of another. This interaction we experience as a force proceeding from one person, having as its aim the production of a change in the other, which, however, fails to move him, or which produces resistance. The hardness of a table and of a person concerns events radically different in content and complexity, but the schema of interaction is experienced as dynamically similar, having to do with the application of force and of resulting actions in line with or contrary to it. (p. 93)

Kövecses: Metaphor in Culture (2005)

Let's have a little look at the fine print in Zoltán Kövecses book Metaphor in Culture. After trawling through about 300 pages of positive evidence, Kövecses gets around to considering some problems. A short passage within the last five pages of the book is dedicated partly to a discussion of incoherence in metaphor (pp. 289–292).

Kövecses looks at two examples. First, he considers the conflict between fear-is-cold metaphors (cold feet etc.) and the sentence Our fears are fueled by acts of terrorism (p. 289). Then he gives a metaphorical explanation for why Clinton couldn't have an affair, while Mitterrand could (p. 291). Let's look at those two examples one by one.

Fear and the "'Cognition over Embodiment' override"

About the fear that seems to be both cold and burning at the same time, Kövecses writes:

What's going on here then? Does metaphorical thought conflict with embodiment, thus contradicting one of the major claims of the cognitive linguistic view of (metaphorical) understanding? I believe this is exactly what is happening. But I do not think that this conflict creates a major difficulty for the experientialist view of the embodiment of metaphors. All that needs to be done is to make a slight change in the strong version of the theory. I suggest that we conceive of the simple but highly generic metaphors that are based on tight correlations in experience (such as INTENSITY IS HEAT) as powerful conceptual devices that can override local embodiment in other parts of the conceptual system (in FEAR IS COLD). In other words, once we have a highly [p. 290:] entrenched and generic simple metaphor such as INTENSITY IS HEAT, this metaphor can be applied even to cases in which the metaphor does not fit local embodiment (as in the case of FEAR IS COLD). I do not know how common similar cases of "embodiment override" are, but I guess they are common enough that they call for some explanation within the theory of embodiment of meaning. The notion of simple, generic, correlation-based metaphors that are powerful enough to override local embodiment would be my best best shot at solving the issue. (pp. 289-90)

The biggest problem with this suggestion might not be its theoretical shortcomings, but rather its blatantly ad hoc character. It is indeed a "good shot" at evading a problem but has little psychological motivation. With such a patch-on-patch methodology, it is difficult to see what would count as a "major difficulty."

More specifically, it is also difficult to see why INTENSITY IS HEAT should be more "tight," "simple," and "entrenched" than FEAR IS COLD. If a "tight correlation" is not a matter of embodiment anymore, how then are we supposed to understand this concept? All this seems to pull the carpet from under several fundamental aspects of the theory, in an obscure corner of the book.

Sex in France and the "'Social-Cultural Experience' Override"

And now for the sex. Kövecses opens his discussion of the Clinton/Mitterrand comparison with a quick brush-up of George Lakoff's theory of political emotions, in particular, the alleged SOCIETY IS A FAMILY metaphor. Then the same puzzle as above:

Given that the same metaphor and metonymy in the French conceptual system [as in the American], how come marital infidelity never became a political issue in France? I believe that thte answer is that another part of the conceptual system can override some of the mappings of the SOCIETY IS A FAMILY metaphor. If there is a culture, such as France, in which sexual freedom (of even family members) is an important value, then the metaphorical connection "family issue → political issue" is not made (i.e., activated) because it would be inconsistent with the part of the conceptual system that maintains that sexual freedom is important. In other words, a part of the broader cultural context (in this case, the value of sexual freedom in France) can override the particular mappings that a culture sets up between the FAMILY source and the SOCIETY target. (p. 291)

So you see, your values are founded in metaphorical thought, except when they are founded in your values.

Who's On Top, Anyway?

The notion of "override," here as in Lakoff's version, implicitly requires one mechanism to have a higher priority than another.

This assumption is usually not spelled out when the concept is invoked, since it is usually called upon to explain inconvenient data while still maintaining the strong view that "metaphor governs thought." This is of course impossible if one simultaneously says that thought governs metaphor.

Naturally, Kövecses also faces this problem, which Michael Kimmel apparently pointed out to him (p. 292). Consequently, he goes on to disavow the rhetoric of the preceding pages:

The talk about "overrides" may seem to suggest some kind of temporal and causal progression from a "universal base" to a "cultural overlay" and an ontologically "most basic" part from which other things emerge, or develop. I do not intend any such interpretation. I do not claim that there is first a universally embodied shared metaphor in different cultures, just as I do not claim that the three systems that interact in metaphorical conceptualization [bodily, cultural, and cognitive] can be meaningfully separated from each other for other than heuristic purposes (see chapter 10). As I have argued elsewhere (Kövecses, 2000a) and in chapter 10, I view the emergence of metaphors as being simultaneously shaped by both embodiment and culture (and most likely also by communicative context). I simply use "override" as a convenient way of talking about certain "incoherences" and "conflicts" among the heuristically postulated systems. In reality, all that we see is the differences in metaphorical conceptualization across and within cultures. Thus the term override should be taken as representing a convenient fiction to talk about such differences as we move from culture to culture, from subculture to subculture, and so forth. (p. 292)

Falling back on "words don't matter" is a bizarre argument for somebody working in cognitive metaphor theory; but rhetoric aside, what does this mean in terms of the two examples above?

Specifically, have a second look at the following two snippets:

… generic metaphors that are based on tight correlations in experience … can override local embodiment …

… a part of the broader cultural context … can override the particular mappings …

What happens if we replace these sentences with the pedestrian observation that cultures differ?

There might be a reading under which this states more than the tautology that things differ when they differ, but I don't feel I'm getting much to work with here.

Berlin: "Ethnobiological Classification" (1978)

Brent Berlin considers data from two "prescientific" cultures and concludes that their category systems are based on appearance above the basic level, and based on utility below.

Since appearances "cry out to be named" (p. 11) not all plant names will reflect practical concerns:

This finding would seem to controvert the view that preliterate man names and classifies only those organisms in the environment that have some immediate functional significance for survival. More than one-third of the named plants in both Tzeltal and Aguaruna, for example, lack any cultural utility, and these are not pestiferous plants that must be avoided due to poisonous properties or the like. (p. 11)

A couple of times in the paper (e.g., p. 20), he raises the issue of simple versus compound names for categories. He seems to think that the basic level should, normally and on average, be the lowest level that has simple names (tree, pine, etc.), but he doesn't discuss the topic specifically and in detail, perhaps he didn't have enough quantitative data for a meaningful claim.

His conclusion is that

folk biological classification is based on a recognition of natural discontinuities in the biological world that are considered to be similar or different because of gross, readily perceivable characteristics of form and behavior. (p. 24)

Criticisms of cognitive metaphor theory cited by Yu

By and large, Ning Yu's book on metaphors in Chinese is faithful to cognitive metaphor theory. However, he does cite some critics of the theory (as of 1999) and discusses a few of them in chapter 2.8. He rejects them all on the account that they define metaphor differently than Lakoff and Johnson.

The authors that Yu lists as critics of cognitive metaphor theory are:

• Dorothy Holland: "All is metaphor" (1982), a review of Metaphors We Live By
• Earl R. Mac Cormac: A Cognitive Theory of Metaphor (1985)
• Anna Wierzbicka: "Metaphors Linguists Live By" (1986)
• Andrew Ortony: The Cognitive Structure of Emotions (1988), see also these experts
• Jackendoff and Aaron's review of More Than Cool Reason (1991)
• Naomi Quinn: "The cultural basis of metaphor," in James W. Fernandez: Beyond Metaphor (1991)
• Hoyt Alverson: "Metaphor and experience," also in the anthology by Fernandez (1991)
• Bipi Indurkhya: Metaphor and Cognition (1992)
• John M. Kennedy and John Vervaeke: "Metaphor and knowledge atained via the body" (1993)
• Cristina Cacciari and Sam Glucksberg: "Understanding figurative language," in Morton Ann Gernsbacher (ed.): Handbook of Psycholinguistics (1994)
• Gregory Murphy: "On metaphoric representation" (1996) and "Reasons to doubt the present evidence for metaphoric representation" (1997)

Gibbs, Lima, and Francozo: "Metaphor is grounded in embodied experience" (2006)

This is a very interesting paper that reports on an experiment investigating the relation between folk theories of hunger and folk theories of desire. It is written in defense of cognitive metaphor theory but raises a whole array of interesting problems.

Postulates: Embodied primitives and non-embodied compounds
The authors claim that

the poetic value and the communicative expressiveness of metaphoric language partly arises from its roots in people's ordinary, felt sensations of their bodies in action. (p. 1190)

And, in the conclusion, they add that "a significant aspect of metaphoric language is moetivated by embodied experience" (p. 1208).

Following Joe Grady, they also claim that primary metaphors are more likely to be translatable or perhaps universal, since compound metaphors may have different ingredients in different languages:

One implication of our findings is that the ability to translate various linguistic metaphors from one language to another rests on the degree to which these verbal expressions instantiate primary metaphors. (p. 1208)

Method
The authors use a quite interesting experimental paradigm to test their claims with respect to the example metaphor DESIRE IS HUNGER.

Basically, they a group of students to rate a number physical symptoms for relatedness to hunger and another group to rate the same symptoms for relatedness to desire.

This first gives them a list of symptoms seen as typical for hunger in Brazil and in California. Many of these are the same, such as the stomach grumbling or the mouth watering.

The relativity of hunger
But there are also exceptions. Thus, the Brazilian Portuguese speakers generally found that a dry mouth was related to hunger, while being annoyed or depressed isn't. The American English speakers found the opposite.

According to the authors, these differences "reflect something of how cultural experiences shape some of our embodied understandings of hunger," and they speculate a bit about the cultural causes (p. 1204). They repeat this point later:

For instance, the linguistic items She drooled anytime she saw Bob and My stomach aches in anticipation of having sex with Mary were rated as much more acceptable in English than in Portuguese. These differences indicate that the salience of particular, localized bodily experiences of desire as hunger may differ across the two languages. (p. 1207)

Testing for correlation between hunger and desire
After having rated various symptoms with respect to their relation to hunger, the authors are able to see if this relation is mirrored in linguistic items expressing sexual desire, romantic desire, and other desire.

The authors affirm that this is indeed the case, but the details are telling.

For English and Portuguese, the various symptoms are put into two categories, one set strongly correlated with hunger (stomach grumbling) and another only very weakly correlated with hunger (knees swelling). This yields two "weak" sets and two "strong" sets.

The theory is then that this correlation can be rediscovered in the realm of desire. This hypothesis is tested in two ways.

First, some subjects are asked to rate whether certain symptoms are characteristic of desire. For instance, they are asked whether people feel dizzy when they are "deeply in love" (p. 1205). That is the "body questions" experiment.

Second, a number of sentences are produced by the experimenters in which the symptoms are used to talk about desire. For instance, the experimenters ask the subjects to rate the naturalness of the sentence I have a strong headache for you. That is the "language questions" experiment.

Results
In their table of results (p. 1206), the authors have lumped all symptoms in the same block together.

For instance, they have treated all sentences in the cell "English" x "Linguistic" x "Lust" x "Strong" as data points from the same distribution and checked whether that distribution differs significantly from the distribution in the cell "English" x "Linguistic" x "Lust" x "Weak". These contrasts generally do exist.

Critique
Averaging over the symptoms gives a general sense of whether hunger and desire correlates, given the dimensions selected by the experimenters. The authors admit that

our findings on DESIRE IS HUNGER do not imply a complete equivalence between desire and hunger, but only a [sic] strong correlations between them" (p. 1207).

This averaging over all items also smooths out the problem that many sentences are natural in one realm, but not the other.

I would, for instance, like to know how exactly the subjects responded to sentences like My stomach was aching for you. But these interesting differences are blurred because the data is reported without distinctions between various sentences.

It would also have been natural to have a linguistic test for hunger as well as for desire. Consider for instance pairs such as these:

1. ?I'm becoming weak for you. (p. 1205)
2. ?I'm becoming weak for food.

1. ?I have a strong headache for knowledge. (p. 1205)
2. ?I have a strong headache for sugar.

Giving such pairs to different subjects would give a more even experimental paradigm and filter out the effect of the (sometimes quite helpless) prose in the test sentences.


I would also very much like to know if such pairs could indeed produce significant differences. Currently, the paper can't tell me because it only used linguistic stimuli in one part of the study, and doesn't report the responses to individual items.

Boers and Stengers: "Adding sound to the picture" (2008)

This paper by Frank Boers and Hélène Stengers forms a part of the anthology Confronting Metaphor in Use (2008). It makes two points:

1. Different languages apply source domains with different frequencies;
2. the exact shapes of metaphorical idioms are motivated by sound.

Cross-lingual variation in source domain frequencies
The first point should be quite uncontroversial. Boers and Stengers give the example that Spanish has 42 bullfighting idioms, while English has three (p. 69)

However, as they note themselves (p. 69), they are not taking the frequency of the various idioms into account. Instead, they just count the number of dictionary entries.

Boers and Stengers try to patch this deficiency up by performing some corpus searches for the most common idioms in order to use those as an indicator for actual frequency (p. 69-70). This gives a couple of data points with indications of relative frequencies, but not more.

Idiom forms are based on sound
Boers and Stengers' second point is that phrases like it takes two to tango are selected over phrases like it takes two to waltz because of their attractive sound qualities. Further, they predict that English should have more phonetic motivation because of its relatively fixed word order and limited morphology.

Again, these claims are interesting, but their statistical methods for testing them are flawed. In particular, Boers and Stengers do not have any concept of accidental rhyme and alliteration in a language. This essentially means that the differences in "motivation" could be due to the fact that English simple rhymes more by accident.

They are, apparently, aware of this problem (p. 72), because they manually filter out Spanish post-fixes on adjectives and nouns (which would make anything in Spanish seem like it rhymed). They should have developed a methodology that could have done this more generally and quantitatively instead.

Gibbs: "Metaphor and Culture" (1999)

In Ray Gibbs' contribution to his and Gerard Steen's anthology, Gibbs air some pretty serious second thoughts about his whole notion of where metaphor.

Thus, looking back at his extensive record of experimental work in metaphor theory, he comments:

My thinking about the role of conceptual metaphor in people's use and understanding of language has mostly embraced an individualistic view of cognition. (p. 151)

[T]his work did not explicitly acknowledge that social and cultural constructions of experience fundamentally shape embodied metaphor. (p. 155)

The alternative is "supra-individual" picture (p. 154) in which metaphors are "cognitive webs [...] spread out into the cultural world" (p. 146).

How Does the Supra-Individual Work?
It's not entirely clear what the dynamics of this more muddled picture would be.

Gibbs give as an example a report of a therapy session in which a couple were asked to think about their sex life in terms of food (p. 158). This clearly is not a metaphor arising spontaneously out of immediate experience, and yet it changed their behavior. Thus, the environment provided the cognition.

Somewhat more obscurely, he also noted that when you get angry, you are already exhibiting some cultural know-how about, e.g., politeness and retribution (p. 155-56). This is, of course, a kind of cultural knowledge build into your body and your immediate reactions, but the example would also benefit from some conceptual clarification.

Filling the Gaps
Gibbs is right about many things in this paper, but I think there are a number of observations that could have improved his thinking:

• Language is primarily a tool for communication. The problem is not just that the subjective semantics that some person has is influenced by the environment---rather, the idea of one isolated person "having" a semantics already misconstrues the situation.
• Language, subjective experience, and the symbolic order (i.e., the social norms) are three different dimensions of the theory, and we should name them so that we can talk about their interactions. I feel fairly certain that the symbolic order is by far the strongest and most immutable of these three.
• The linguist is a member of a culture. Therefore, when the linguistic has intuitions about meaning, these are shaped by social norms. Therefore, when the linguist says, "We experience things this way," the assertion may in some cases be more of a datum (revealing a norm) than an observation (revealing an a priori structure).

Taylor and Mbense: "Red dogs and rotten mealies" (1995)

There is a number of quite interesting observations in Taylor and Mbense's article on the concept of anger in Zulu.

First of all, when you're angry, your heart can be squashed like one squashes something soft (p 197-98). This is conceptualized with the word xhifi as well as the word fithi. Both mean the same thing.

Also, they note that anger is associated with nausea in Zulu. One can thus vomit from anger and if you meet an annoying person, your heart says "sick" (p. 199).

Further, being black-hearted or having a black heart in Zulu has nothing to do with depression -- it means either having literal nausea or being annoyed and irritable (p. 200).

This comes from a folk theory according to which the cause of irritability is black bile. One can thus provoke someone by splashing him with bile (p. 200).

Lastly, in Zulu, as well as in Hungarian, extreme anger is associated with being brought to tears (p. 207)

Farzad Sharifian: "Conceptualizations of chesm 'eye' in Persian" (2011)

From my perspective, this paper is mostly notable for bringing out the tight relationship between the Perisan sufism metaphors employing the eye as a source domain. This observation is parallel to the hypothesis that our conceptualizations of anger as a heated fluid have their roots in medieval medical scholarship.

Sharifian concludes that "there is a close interaction among language, body, and culture," and that "figurative meanings based on the body do not draw their power from the assumption that there is but one natural way in which we interact physically with our environment" (p. 197).

Further evidence that even the constraints theory of metaphor is wrong comes from inconsistent conceptualizations of the same domain. Examples are:

• DOWNHILL IS BAD vs. UPHILL IS BAD
• BAD IS NOT GOOD vs. BAD IS GOOD (in the sense of cool, impressive)
• In Danish, FAT IS IMPLAUSIBLE vs. THIN IS IMPLAUSIBLE
• IMPENETRABLE IS CONVINCING vs. TRANSPARENT IS INTELLIGIBLE

Zoltán Kövecses: "Anger" (1995)

Looking back at the case study on anger metaphors in Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (1987), Zoltán Kövecses clarifies and elaborates his views on the respective roles of culture and body in the shaping of languages.

He reiterates that human physiology constrains metaphor systems (p. 195), but now also concedes that "there may be differences between cultures in both conceptualized and real physiology" (p. 193). Thus, upon reflection, he admits that concepts are "influenced by both culture and the human body" (p. 182).

The assertion that anger may differ physiologically across cultures is followed by a reference to a paper by Robert C. Solomon, "Getting Angry" (1984). From what I gather, the paper contains some anthropological reflection on William James' theory of emotions.

The paper is written partly as a response to Dirk Geeraerts and Stefan Gondelaers' contribution to the same volume, "Looking back at anger."

Geeraerts and Gondelaers' point is (according to Kövecses' summary) that the fluid concepts for anger in English are actually remnants of the medieval theory of the humors, in which moods were explained in terms of imbalances between bodily fluids.

Kövecses' paper seems quite sound and insightful. I would perhaps only add that separating body and culture appears increasingly difficult given that bodies differ, body images differ, and that behavior depends on both.