Cognitive linguistic correlates between language and moral education: insights from German

Morality is commonly regarded in public consciousness as a construct shaped by religious, legal, philosophical, and social dimensions. Although explicit discussions of morality are relatively rare in everyday discourse, linguistic expressions often reveal underlying moral concepts. These concepts play a central role in shaping human decision-making across diverse domains of life, manifesting through both verbal and non-verbal behaviour.Within the cognitive linguistic framework, language and thought are understood to be inextricably linked: while thought is articulated through language, language in turn influences the cognitive processes that underlie thinking. Lakoff and Johnson (1999) introduced the concept of thinking relativism to capture this dynamic, arguing that the use of different metaphors in language can give rise to distinct patterns of thought. From this perspective, it is pertinent to ask whether speakers of different languages – and by extension, members of different cultural communities – conceptualize morality in divergent ways, and how such differences are encoded linguistically. Furthermore, the question arises as to how culturally specific features of language impact the construction of moral concepts.The present study addresses these questions by investigating metaphorical language expressions of morality in the German language and comparing them with the conceptual models established in English, particularly those described by Lakoff (1996, 2002) and Lakoff and Johnson (1999). While their framework primarily reflects American cultural patterns, certain aspects may be considered near-universal and thus offer valuable insights for cross-linguistic and cross-cultural analysis.Our research focuses on identifying and analyzing metaphorical expressions related to morality in contemporary German, and on evaluating how these reflect or differ from the English-language conceptual models. While the German data do not fully reproduce the comprehensive metaphorical system proposed by Lakoff, they nonetheless highlight key similarities and differences in the moral conceptualizations embedded in the two languages.