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Beyond Philology 5, 2008 ISSN 1230-6185

Plant metaphors for the exprcssion of emotions in the English language

ORAZGOZEL ESENOYA

1. Introduction 1.1. Background

One of the most fundamenta! human experiences is that of agriculture. The plants we grow provide our basie needs in shelter, food, medicines, clothing etc. In English, a variety of metaphors is motivated by this experience, some of which have been analysed by eognitive linguistics. Often, however, these studies focus on plant metaphors whose target domains do not involve emotions. For example, Zoltan Kóvecses gives us a detailed account of the metaphor COMPLEX ABSTRACT SYSTEMS ARE PLANTS in his work “Metaphor: A Practical Introduction”. He claims that, in English, the plant domain is mapped onto a variety of target concepts sueh as: social organisations, scientific disciplines, people, economic and political Systems, human relationships, sets of ideas (2002: 98-101). In their book, “Morę Than Cool Reason”, G. Lakoff and M. Turner examine the PEOPLE ARE PLANTS metaphor (1989: 12-14). The IDEAS ARE PLANTS metaphor has been analysed by G. Lakoff and M. Johnson in “Metaphors We Live By” (1980: 47).

It should be pointed out, in all fairness, that isolated examples of plant metaphors for emotions have been mentioned in some works. M. Ettlinger has studied metaphors of Ancient Hebrew and States that, among other things, in this language happiness is conceptualised as vegetation. According