Sunday 13 June 2010

Wednesday 2 June 2010

Control is a Possession


In their 1990 experiment Gibbs Jr. and O’Brien ‘Idioms and mental imagery’ subjects
were given a list of five different idioms in five different ‘emotion-categories’: Anger,
Authority, Secretiveness, Insanity and Revelation. An example for an anger idiom would
be ‘hit the ceiling’ and ‘spill the beans’ for revelation. For each idioms subjects were then
asked to comment in regards to the mental imagery, reversibility, intentionality, manner,causation and whether they value the statement as positive or negative for each idiom. They summarized the results (together with results from previous experiments, largely based on Lakoff & Johnson, later Koevecses) as follows:

IDEAS ARE PHYSICAL ENTITIES
THE MIND IS A CONTAINER, THE MIND IS A BRITTLE OBJECT
ANGER IS HEAT, ANGER IS A HOT FLUID (IN A CONTAINER)
CONTROL IS A POSSESSION, CONTROL IS AN INVISIBLE FORCE
INSANITY IS AN INVISIBLE FORCE


- Gibbs Jr. W. R. and O’Brien J. (1990). Idioms and mental Imagery: The Metaphorical
Motivation for Idiomatic Meaning. In: Altmann, G. (ed.), Cognition 36,
35-68. Elsevier
- Kövecses, Z. (2003). Metaphor and Emotion: Language, Culture, and Body in Human
Feeling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

- Lakoff, G., and Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press