Happiness: A Definitional Effort

The general purpose of this article is twofold: first, to characterize the concept of happiness, and second, to show what is involved in doing so. To accomplish these goals, a large part of this article is concerned with identifying the conceptual metaphors of happiness in the spirit of Lakoff and Johnson (1980). Lakoff and Kövecses (1983) considerably improved on this analysis by showing how, in addition to the metaphors, metonymies also play a major role in the makeup of abstract concepts like anger, and by pointing out that the metaphors and metonymies converge on a prototypical cognitive model. This study goes beyond this latter framework in two ways: First, it is suggested that, in addition to the metaphors and metonymies, what is called inherent concepts are further important ingredients of some abstract concepts, like happiness. Second, it is claimed that, in the light of some current proposals in cognitive linguistics, happiness can be seen as having not one but several cognitive prototypes. It is expected that the conceptual framework outlined here for the analysis of happiness can be usefully extended to the study of other emotion concepts and, possibly, to abstract concepts in general.