“Heart die me”: Feeling, thinking and lingua-cultural diversity

Humans conceptualise and use feelings for cultural maintenance, deploying language to label them.  Humans vary in how they cognize, label, and describe feelings. Cross-linguistically, conventional descriptions of feelings make explicit reference to the body. However, there is variation in how people talk about feelings with somatic referents, giving rise to various lingua-cultural ethno-theories. Drawing on variations in the form and meaning of “feelings-in-the-body” talk, I argue that different organizing principles are employed in categorizing feelings.  WEIRD groups segregate and categorize feelings into “emotions”, “sensations”, “intuition” and “cognition”. Others integrate all bodily and cognitively based feelings into one category. Some linguacultures lack labels for the domain. Through a conceptual semantic analysis of “feelings talk” involving the “heart” cross-linguistically, I show that such talk involves different semiotic projections of the body which are not just metaphorical figurations. 

Keywords: feelings in the heart, conventional body images, encoding idioms, emotion ethnotheories, cultural semantics, grammatical semantics