NOMAD’S PERSPECTIVES: THE CONCEPT OF ANGER IN THE SECRET HISTORY OF MONGOLS

NOMAD’S PERSPECTIVES: THE CONCEPT OF ANGER IN THE SECRET HISTORY OF MONGOLS

This study is motivated by the fact the use of metaphors in Mongolian from a cognitive perspective, which is a relatively new idea for Mongolian linguistics. For this reason, this study attempts to propose a proper cultural model to treat emotion concepts in Mongolian and demonstrate how cultural aspects, figurative languages of emotions, and human physiology play active roles in this system of language and culture. Thus, adopting a cognitive linguistic perspective, this study investigates the metaphorical linguistic expressions of emotion concepts in relation to anger Mongolian. Specifically, it examines culture-specific and language-specific realizations of conceptual metaphors for emotions in Mongolian within the CMT framework based on the historical source titled “Secret History of the Mongols”. This current study highlights the importance of culture in understanding the relationship between metaphor, culture, and cognition, and it provides generalizations for the basic emotion concept of anger and gives fundamental explanations in Mongolian. This systematic analysis of emotional metaphors in Mongolian contributes importantly to the major claims of the Contemporary Metaphor Theory, which states that metaphors are grounded on both universal embodiment and social-cultural experiences. Even though English and Mongolian belong to very different language families representing totally different sedentary and nomadic cultures, they share some universal conceptual metaphors for particular emotions with each other. Emotion metaphors are closely related to certain physical aspects of the human body across cultures; however, the speakers of English and Mongolian differ in many ways: differential experiential basis, cognitive preferences, social and physical environments, and the histories of the two nations. Finally, this research summarizes by stating that universal human embodied experiences can be the basis for highly schematic conceptualizations of emotions across cultures. The culture-specific and language-specific mappings and their elaborations are grounded only on cultural embodiment at a specific level in cultures.