Abstract
This chapter applies a Cultural Linguistic perspective to survey the cultural conceptualisations of river in the context of love in Hungarian folksongs (Sharifian in Cultural conceptualisations and language: theoretical framework and applications. John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 2011, The Routledge handbook of language and culture. Routledge, London/New York, 2015). In traditional folk cultural communities, experiences about nature are potential source domains for metaphorical imagery in communicating emotional states. Based on an analysis of the collected linguistic data, it is proposed that the conceptualisations of river in the folksongs can be traced back to the underlying cultural metaphor emotion is river water, which develops in several related metaphors and image schemas grounded in cultural experiences. Most importantly, the folksongs instantiate the cultural schema reservedness in expressing emotions, which derives from the norms of peasant morality. It is concluded that the images of nature in the folksongs have connection to emotion metaphors (Kövecses in Metaphor and emotion. Language, culture and body in human feeling. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000) but their explanation requires in-depth knowledge on the norms of love and morality in the traditional Hungarian folk culture.
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Notes
- 1.
“The term construal refers to our manifest ability to conceive and portray the same situation in alternate ways” (Langacker 2008: 43).
- 2.
Referring to the Hungarian revolution against Austrian dominance within Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in 1848–49.
- 3.
Another possible interpretation of line 4 is ‘therefore her love stuck on me.’
- 4.
Literally: ‘my flower’
- 5.
Note that in Hungarian possessive suffixes can also indicate multiple possession.
- 6.
In the sense ‘distract’ (from the riverbed)
- 7.
The Hungarian word means ‘falls asleep’ in the meaning of ‘freezes.’
- 8.
‘Clean wheat’ means the wheat grains free from rye or other cereals after threshing and riddling
- 9.
Literally: ‘my dove’
- 10.
Literally: ‘digest’
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Baranyiné Kóczy, J. (2017). Cultural Conceptualisations of river in Hungarian Folksongs. In: Sharifian, F. (eds) Advances in Cultural Linguistics. Cultural Linguistics. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4056-6_11
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