Nature, Metaphor, Culture: Cultural Conceptualizations in Hungarian Folksongs

Description

This book analyses the emotional message of Hungarian folksongs from a Cultural Linguistic perspective, employing a wide range of empirical devices. It combines theoretical notions with analytical devices and has a multidisciplinary essence: it relies on the latest Cultural Linguistic findings, employing spatial semantics, cognitive linguistics, cognitive psychology and ethnography. The book addresses key questions including: How is nature conceptualized by a folk cultural group? How are emotions and other mental states expressed via nature imagery with respect to metaphors and construal schemas? The author argues that folksongs reflect the Hungarian peasant communities’ specific treatment of emotions, captured in an underlying cultural schema ‘reservedness.’ This schema is grounded in principals of morality and tradition, and governs the various levels of representation. The main topics discussed are related to two core issues: cultural metaphors and cultural schemas of construal in folksongs. It provides a detailed example, based on over 1000 folksongs, of how a cultural group’s cognition can be analyzed and better understood through a representative corpus-based linguistic approach. The research is also pioneering in constructing a comprehensive analysis framework adapted to folk poetry, and offers an example of how cultural conceptualizations can be investigated in various discourse types. Last but not least, the book offers insights into the work of Hungarian linguists and folklorists concerning cultural conceptualizations, which have largely been unavailable in English. Front Matter ....Pages i-xx Front Matter ....Pages 1-1 Folksongs in Cultural Linguistics (Judit Baranyiné Kóczy)....Pages 3-25 Folk Conceptualizations Across Languages (Judit Baranyiné Kóczy)....Pages 27-42 Spatial Metaphors in Nature Imagery (Judit Baranyiné Kóczy)....Pages 43-55 Front Matter ....Pages 57-60 Cultural Metaphors Related to Forest (Judit Baranyiné Kóczy)....Pages 61-79 Cultural Metaphors Related to River (Judit Baranyiné Kóczy)....Pages 81-97 Cultural Metaphors Related to Weather (Judit Baranyiné Kóczy)....Pages 99-113 Orientational Metaphors (Judit Baranyiné Kóczy)....Pages 115-132 Back Matter ....Pages 133-134 Front Matter ....Pages 135-137 Mental Spaces (Judit Baranyiné Kóczy)....Pages 139-158 Spatial Grounding (Judit Baranyiné Kóczy)....Pages 159-187 Reference Point Constructions (Judit Baranyiné Kóczy)....Pages 189-202 Perspectivisation (Judit Baranyiné Kóczy)....Pages 203-215 Back Matter ....Pages 217-218 Front Matter ....Pages 219-219 Cultural Conceptualizations in Folksongs: A Synthesis (Judit Baranyiné Kóczy)....Pages 221-228 Back Matter ....Pages 229-232