CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR ‘ANGER IS NATURAL FORCE’ IN VIETNAMESE AND JAPANESE

Abstract

According to Lakoff and his partners, human emotion by nature is very abstract and to a certain extent, is conceptualized and expressed through metaphors based on human-body experiences and cultural models. Lakoff aggregates some metaphors for ‘anger’ such as “ANGER is HEAT”, “ANGER is FIRE”, “ANGER is THE HOT FLUID IN A CONTAINER”, “ANGER is THE LOSS OF CONTROL”, “ANGER is AN OPPONENT (in a struggle)”, “ANGER is A DANGEROUS ANIMAL”, “ANGER is A BURDEN”. However, our survey shows that in Vietnamese and Japanese, there exists a conceptual metaphor "ANGER is NATURAL FORCE" which is not mentioned in Lakoff's thesis. This paper summarizes the number of metaphorical expressions "ANGER is NATURAL FORCE" collected from the Vietnamese and Japanese short stories and discusses the similarities and differences in such metaphor in the two languages.