Love in the time of the corpora. Preferential conceptualizations of love in world Englishes

According to Gibbs (2006) “there is still insufficient attention paid to the exact ways that cultural beliefs shape both people’s understandings of their embodied experiences and the conceptual metaphors which arise from these experiences.” For example, the conceptual metaphor EMOTIONS ARE FLUIDS WITHIN THE BODY seems to underlie a wide variety of metaphorical expressions used by speakers from different linguistic and cultural areas all around the world. The geographical distribution of these metaphorical expressions is so general that numerous researchers have proclaimed their universal character, in so far as they are based on our common, embodied experience (Kövecses, 2000). However, the apparent ubiquity of this metaphorical mapping in contemporary emotional expressions does not necessarily imply that speakers from different linguistic or dialectal areas understand (or, of course, experience) emotions in the same identical way (Díaz-Vera and Caballero, 2013). In this paper, I deal with the analysis of conceptual variation in the metaphorical construction of love in a group of dialectal varieties of contemporary English. Differently to earlier studies of love metaphors in English (Quinn 1987; Baxter, 1992; Kövecses, 1998), my main aim here is to analyze the socio-cultural dynamics of conceptual metaphor through the reconstruction of the preferential conceptualizations of love by speakers of a series of dialectal varieties of the same language, as spoken in culturally diverse regions. Through the analysis of the socio-cultural dynamics of conceptual metaphor, I intend to contribute to the field of Cognitive Dialectology by addressing the question whether cultural and conceptual differences can be detected language-internally, not just across languages. Based on textual data extracted from the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbE; Davies, 2013), I will demonstrate here that the varieties of world English under scrutiny show significant differences in the conventional use of figurative expressions. Thereafter, these findings will be related to the cultural background of each speech community.