‘Anger’ In English and Nepali Conceptual Metaphors: A Cognitive Perspective

This paper deals with a cognitive study of near-universal primary metaphor ‘anger’ in English and Nepali. The cross cultural and metaphorical conceptualization of anger emotion with linguistic embodiment, is compared to validate that the abstract anger emotion is described by concrete bodily- experience. The secondary data is collected from the survey report of Nepali idioms (Paudel,2061 B.S) and Oxford English idiom dictionary. The analysis is based on conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff & Koveches, 1987) to compare anger-emotion for finding out similarities and dissimilarities to show the universality and specificity across two different cultures. The upper part of the body ‘head’ container, is the central and common locus point for embodied ‘anger’ in both English and Nepali embodied idiomatic expression. The similarities among with ‘anger is heat, heated fluid, substance and spatial in body container’ is that ‘anger is spatial in the container’ shared more classified body part container with greater number of idioms in both English and Nepali. The center-periphery (in- out) from landmark to trajector orientation with spatiality in body container are the most commonly expressed embodied anger metaphor in both English and Nepali embodied idioms. English has less specific separate body -part container activated overtly in idiomatic expression, but Nepali has more separate and classified body container activation overtly among over all embodied ‘anger’ metaphor conceptualization in given data. However, the similarity is that both languages conceptualize ‘anger is heat’, ‘anger is heated fluid’ ‘anger is substance’ and ‘anger is spatial’ in the body container.