‘Better shamed before one than shamed before all’: Shaping shame in Old English and Old Norse texts

Flushing in anger, blushing in shame

“…In this debate concerning the relationship between culture and the conceptualization of emotion through language, the idea that emotions are composed of semantic universals has been the prevailing one. Recent discussions, however, have come to the conclusion that the conceptualization of emotions is sensitive to social, cultural and historical influences (Kövecses 2005;Geeraerts & Gevaert 2008;Díaz-Vera 2011bDíaz-Vera & Manrique Antón 2015). This new approach, which emerged from the study of cross-cultural conceptual metaphors/metonymies in the cognitive linguistic tradition, introduces the idea of the "embodied cultural prototype", and synthesizes the two aforementioned diverging views.…”

“…To explain this metaphorical process or transference of meaning, the cognitive linguistic view supports the idea that metaphors are motivated, i.e., grounded in human experience. Thus, the conceptualization of anger in many languages, including Old Norse from a very early stage, seems to correspond to the so-called "container" metaphors, such as THE BODY IS A CONTAINER FOR THE EMOTIONS, ANGER IS HEAT, and EMOTIONS ARE FLUIDS (Kövecses 2002;Díaz-Vera & Manrique Antón 2015).…”

Old English emotion is temperature: Cultural influences on a universal experience

“…Within this framework, various researchers have studied the relation between socio-cultural change and metaphor change in historical stages of language. For example, in their studies on shame denominations in Old English and in Old Norse, Díaz-Vera (2014) and Díaz-Vera & Manrique-Antón (2015) draw a clear connection between the Christianization of Northern European peoples and dramatic changes in their linguistic expressions for this emotion. Broadly speaking, whereas pre-Christian texts tend to show a preference for figurative expressions that highlight the social aspects of shame (as corresponds to a collectivist society; Hofstede 1991), Christianity brought a progressive change towards a more psychologised understanding of this emotion in order to reflect the new moral standards.…”

The size of shame and pride

“…anger, for example, is one of the most investigated ones, while other moral emotions like pride and shame have received comparatively less attention (for a definition of moral emotion and how shame and pride fit in the category, see Cova et al, 2015). Most of the CMT work on pride and shame has focused on English (including diachronic accounts) (Kövecses, 1986(Kövecses, , 1990(Kövecses, , 2000Tissari, 2006a, b;Díaz-Vera & Manrique-Antón, 2015), but it also includes less investigated languages like German (Oster, 2010), Serbian (Broćić, 2018(Broćić, , 2019, or Persian (Bakhtiar, 2018). Interestingly, these works suggest that the underlying system of conceptual metaphors and metonymies contributing to the representation of pride and shame is reasonably stable across languages, at least in their most general formulation.…”

“…Table 1 includes mappings reported for pride and related concepts (vanity, conceit, dignity, self-esteem, self-respect) in present-day English, Early Modern English, Late Modern English, Old English, German, Spanish and Serbian (Kövecses, 1986(Kövecses, , 1990(Kövecses, , 2000Tissari, 2006b;Oster, 2010;Broćić, 2018Broćić, , 2019. Table 2, reports on mappings for shame and related concepts (embarrassment, modesty and guilt), in present-day English, Late Modern English, Early Modern English, Middle English, Old English, Old Norse, and Persian (Holland & Kipnis, 1995;Kövecses, 2000;Tissari, 2006a;Bakhtiar, 2018;Díaz-Vera & Manrique-Antón, 2015;Broćić, 2018). Most mappings are shared with other emotions, of course, since there are hardly any emotion-specific metaphors or metonymies (Kövecses, 1998).…”