Embodied Conceptualisation of Emotion Metaphors: A Cognitive Semantic Analysis of English, Hindi, Khortha and Marwari

Abstract

This study explores the embodied conceptualisation of emotion metaphors in English, Hindi, Khortha, and Marwari, examining how abstract emotional experiences are conceptually mapped through concrete bodily source domains. Drawing on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory framework of embodiment-based cognitive semantics, the study identifies and analyses metaphorical expressions of anger, happiness, sadness, social emotions (pride, honour, shame), and Heart as an embodied source domain collected through elicitation from native speakers above 25 years of age and from secondary textual sources, including folk narratives, proverbs, and idioms. English is included as a comparison language because of its extensive documentation in cognitive linguistic research. However, besides Hindi and English, Khortha and Marwari are largely unexplored in a cognitive-semantic context. Findings show that all four languages conceptualise anger through heat, pressure, fluid containment, and explosive release; happiness through upward movement, brightness, and expansion; sadness through downward movement, darkness, and submersion; and social emotions through bodily posture and body-part symbolism involving the head, chest, eyes, and nose. These patterns cluster into recurring oppositional cognitive schemas — upwardness versus downwardness, brightness versus darkness, expansion versus contraction, and fullness versus emptiness — that organise emotional cognition across the languages, lending support to the embodiment hypothesis of shared physiological grounding. At the same time, Hindi, Khortha, and Marwari display a wider range of body-part lexicalised metaphorical expressions, particularly involving blood, the heart, and the nose, along with culturally specific elaborations such as nose-based honour and heart-centred flourishing imagery that are comparatively less salient in English and are interpreted qualitatively. The study argues that emotion metaphors are simultaneously embodied and culturally mediated, and it contributes to cross-linguistic metaphor theory, Indo-Aryan cognitive semantics, and applications in translation studies, multilingual education, and computational modelling of emotion in low-resource regional languages.