Rage like an Egyptian: the conceptualization of anger
Ines Köhler
Introduction and theoretical framework
The influence of language as part of human complexity and therefore as a kind of cultural science in semantic studies may not be ignored.
Every language is the linguistic result of our perception of the world. Our perception as well as knowledge of our world depend on a culturally formed framework which is entitled to understanding and intersubjective virtue – that means reality. In this way, a world represents a (meaningful) social construct. We perceive all entities of the world, sort them into categories and give them meaning and names – so we can deal with and talk about the things in the world (cf. Berger and Luckmann 2007). In other words:
“The world is a perceived world and not a metaphysical world without a knower. Categories as we understand them exist ‘in the eye of the human beholder.’ Categorization is a cognitive human phenomenon that allows us to minimize cognitive efforts and avoids approaching dangers. Theoretically, different people or societies could divide the world into widely different categories. [...] In short, categories are anthropocentrically biased, and do not ‘exist in the world’ as such” (Goldwasser 2002, 27 – 28).
Categorization and cognitive linguistics
Categorization is attractive to linguists because categorizing something often means naming it. Knowing the meaning of a word often is to know the name of the category. Language itself is an object of categorization as well. Linguistic expressions get categorized as examples of lexical or syntactic categories, like noun, verb, etc. (cf. Taylor 2005, xi–xii).
Categorization
Perception, thinking, speaking and storage of meaning are topics the ancient Greek philosophers already reflected about. The presumption that the meaning of a word results from a conjunction of adequate quantity of common features traces back to Aristotle. The Aristotelian classical model of conceptual categories defines a category in terms of a set of necessary and sufficient features (cf. Taylor 2005, 20–23; Kleiber 1993, 12).
No entity that does not possess the full set of features can be a member of the related category. In short, a category is defined by the following:
1. Sufficient, for example possession of all features guarantees membership.
2. Membership of a category is based upon present or absent features.
3. Each member of a category has the same categorical status.
4. Categories are entities with clear-cut and rigid boundaries.
Examples such as the platypus demonstrate, however, that this rigidly defined structure of category exhibits very real structural problems. Eco (1999, 58) describes this phenomenon:
“The platypus is a strange animal. It seems to have been conceived to foil all classification, be it scientific or popular [...] its flat body is covered with a dark brown coat; it has no neck and a tail like a beaver’s; it has a duck’s beak [...] no outer ears, and the four feet have five webbed toes, bit with claws; it stays under water (and eats there) enough to be considered a fish or an amphibian. The female lays eggs but ‘breasts-feeds’ her young”.
Due to such discoveries and to the so-called black-box phenomena, the focus of human behaviour and research in general has changed: primarily, it has focussed on observable, measurable human behaviour and now it has switched to cognitive processes as part of human complexity (cf. Schwarz 1996, 13). In the course of this so-called cognitive-turn, following ethnosemantical, psychological, biological and anthropological studies were able to prove that categorization is to understand in a broad way but with fuzzy boundaries. This, however, makes it impossible to form a definite opinion about categorization (e.g. Berlin and Kay 1969; Rosch 1972a, 1972b, 1973a, 1973b).
Cognitive linguistics
Within this new approach, the most influential theory is the prototype theory which is part of the broad field of cognitive linguistics (Taylor 2005, 41). Cognitive linguistics is a conglomerate of central points of linguistic research that are clo...