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Old English emotion is temperature: Cultural influences on a universal experience

Paper · 2024 · Javier E. Díaz-Vera

Summary

Temperature is often treated as a near-universal source domain for emotion metaphors: warmth goes with pleasant feelings like love and heat with anger. Díaz-Vera tests whether this pattern reflects universal bodily experience or cultural history. He takes high body temperature as the starting domain and searches the full Dictionary of Old English Corpus (850–1100) for positive-emotion expressions built on heat words. Candidate vocabulary comes from standard Old English dictionaries and a thesaurus. The search follows Stefanowitsch's Metaphorical Pattern Analysis, and emotions are grouped with the Geneva Emotion Wheel. The material falls into three groups: fire, unpleasant heat, and boiling. The main finding is that Old English could frame positive emotions such as interest, pride and love as unpleasant heat. The paper traces two cultural sources for this. Germanic verse treats low-control emotions as disruptive things to be regulated. Christian, Latin-influenced prose and glosses instead present divine love as intense, even painful, fire, likely a conceptual borrowing from Latin. Overall, the result supports the view that emotion metaphors are shaped by culture rather than fixed by the body.

Key points

  • Sources: DOE, Bosworth–Toller (BT), the Thesaurus of Old English (TOE) and the OED supplied the vocabulary. The DOEC (about 3 million Old English words across prose, poetry, interlinear glosses and glossaries) supplied the examples and frequencies.
  • Structure: the analysis follows three TOE subcategories under 03.01.09 Heat: Fire/flame, Hotness, and Boiling.
  • Counts:
    • 26 fire occurrences, expressing interest and love
    • 16 heat occurrences, all expressing love
    • 11 uses of the verb weallan 'to boil', expressing interest, pride or love
  • Method: Metaphorical Pattern Analysis (Stefanowitsch 2006), with emotion families assigned using the Geneva Emotion Wheel's valence and control dimensions.
  • Genre split: poetry stresses loss of control, while prose and glosses stress the intensity of love. The LOVE IS FIRE metaphor appears only in strongly Latinate texts.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Search outward from a source domain (all heat words) rather than inward from a target (emotion words), which surfaces figurative uses a target-first search would miss.
  • I2. A metaphor's source domain does not fix the valence of what it describes: "burning" love can be positive yet framed as hard to bear.
  • I3. Emotions are placed on two axes, valence and control, instead of carrying only a flat label, and control turns out to be the dimension that explains the data.
  • I4. Splitting the corpus by text type (verse, prose, glosses) exposed a borrowed pattern that was confined to translation-like texts.
  • I5. The analysis is organised by thesaurus hierarchy codes (TOE 03.01.09.x), which makes each grouping traceable to a fixed taxonomy.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): seed metaphor detection in prag with concrete source lexicons (temperature, fire, boiling) and flag their attachment to experiencer subjects as candidate emotion frames.
  • I2 (answer): sentiment or attitude answers should come from the frame and its target emotion, not from the literal polarity of the source word.
  • I3 (world): store emotion states in the text world with valence and control slots, so a reader can reason about a character losing control even during a pleasant emotion.
  • I4 (learn): stratify evaluation and silver-data agreement by genre, so patterns or errors that live only in one register are not averaged away.
  • I5 (world): key metaphor and source-domain mappings to WordNet or FrameNet nodes, so every figurative reading can be explained by an explicit ontology path.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of Castilla-La ManchaCiudad Real · Spain9 works · 48 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 17,450 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 17,296 worksPsychology · 1,649 worksExperimental and Cognitive Psychology · 930 works

🧭 Topics 3Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,379 worksSentiment & emotion · 1,035 worksHistorical linguistics & language change · 250 works

Cite

Cite as Javier E. Díaz-Vera. 2024. Old English emotion is temperature: Cultural influences on a universal experience. Russian Journal of Linguistics 28.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.22363/2687-0088-34603

@article{diazvera2024old,
  title = {{Old English emotion is temperature: Cultural influences on a universal experience}},
  author = {Javier E. Díaz-Vera},
  journal = {Russian Journal of Linguistics 28},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.22363/2687-0088-34603},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.22363/2687-0088-34603}
}

References

26 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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  26. Article history: Received: 05 May 2023 Accepted: 7 August 2023 Bionote: find

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