The metaphorical conceptualization of sadness in the Anglo-Saxon elegies

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to explore the predominant metaphorical conceptualization of sadness in three Old English elegiac monologues whose main themes are the pain and solitude of exile and separation. Taking as a starting point the Cognitive Theory of Metaphor and briefly reviewing the experimental evidence that supports the experiential grounding of our conceptualization of sadness, as well as our own previous research on the Old English expressions for emotional distress, we analyze the use of sadness metaphors in the elegies The Wanderer, The Seafarer and The Wife’s Lament. This analysis clearly shows that in the Old English period, as in present day English, sadness was largely expressed in metaphorical terms. Cold, darkness and physical discomfort were recurrent source domains in its depiction, which suggests a long-term trend in the metaphorical conceptualization of sadness, whose cognitive reality is empirically supported by experimental research.

Exploring metaphorical conceptualizations of ENVY in English and Chinese: A multifactorial corpus analysis

“…Conceptualizations of human emotions have been a research topic of great interest in linguistics, for there have been many studies on various emotion concepts, such as ANGER (Glynn, 2014;Kahumburu, 2016;Yu, 1995), FEAR (Caballero & Díaz-Vera, 2021;Oster, 2010Oster, , 2012, HAPPINESS (Nguyen, 2016;Rajeg, 2019;Stefanowitsch, 2004), JEALOUSY (Díaz-Vera & Caballero, 2013;Ogarkova, 2007), LOVE (Gawda, 2019;Glynn, 2002), PRIDE (Soares da Silva, 2020), SADNESS (Verdaguer & Castaño, 2018), and SHAME (Krawczak, 2014a(Krawczak, , 2014b(Krawczak, , 2018. These studies have revealed that, in contemporary language use, human emotions are often understood or conceptualized in metaphorical terms (e.g.…”

Aquiles en el exilio. Lectura comparada del libro 9 de la Ilíada y el poema anglosajón “The Wanderer”

“…9 Además, insiste en que su compañero es el dolor (v. 30 -sorg to geferan) y que posee profundas heridas del corazón (v. 49 heortan benne). Observamos en algunas de estas expresiones la correlación entre el dolor del alma y el clima invernal que detallaremos más adelante (Verdaguer -Castaño 2018).…”