Green-eyed monsters: a corpus-based study of the concepts of ENVY and JEALOUSY in modern English

In this paper, I apply metaphorical pattern analysis suggested in Stefanowitsch (2006) to a British National Corpus-based study of the emotion concepts of JEALOUSY and ENVY. On identification of central conceptual metaphors of these emotion concepts, I show that although both manifest significant similarity in the source domains via which they are construed in English, their specificity in relation to each other and other emotion concepts can nevertheless be assessed with the help of a quantitative distributional analysis of the frequencies of occurrence of metaphoric expressions associated with each of the concepts under study. Furthermore, I question whether folk metaphoric conceptualizations of the English concepts of JEALOUSY and ENVY, together with three other “prototypical” social emotion concepts of SHAME, GUILT and PRIDE, are consistent with the criteria posited for differentiating them as “secondary” against the set of “basic”, or “primary” emotion concepts in English-speaking psychological literature (Ekman 1992, Ortony/Turner 1990, Parrot 2001) and discuss the implications of this consistency in the context of the role of metaphoric language in forming cultural models of emotions and influencing the English language speakers' conjectures about emotional experiences in scientific research