1 VIET NAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HA NOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGE & INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST – GRADUATE STUDIES
*****************

NGUYỄN THỊ THƠM
THE MEANINGS OF THE NOUN LOVE
IN SOME ENGLISH EXPRESSIONS
(FROM COGNITIVE SEMANTICS PERSPECTIVE)

(TÌM HIỂU Ý NGHĨA CỦA DANH TỪ LOVE
TRONG MỘT SỐ CỤM TỪ TRONG TIẾNG ANH
XÉT TỪ GÓC ĐỘ NGỮ NGHĨA HỌC TRI NHẬN)
M.A. Minor Programme Thesis
Field: English Linguistics
Code: 60 22 15

Hanoi - 2010

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Page
Acknowledgement…………………………………………………………………………… i
Certificate of originality of study project report……………………………………………… ii
Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………… iii
Table of contents……………………………………………………………………………….iv
PART I: INTRODUCTION ………………………………………………………………… 1
1. Rationale 1
2. Aims of the study 2
3. Scope of the study 3
4. Research question 3
5. Organization of the study 3
PART II: DEVELOPMENT 4
CHAPTER 1: THEORITICAL BACKGROUND 4
1.1. Cognitive semantics 4
1.2. Cognitive metaphor theory 5
1.2.1. Structural metaphors 6
1.2.2. Orientational metaphors 12

2.4.1. Love is a container 25
2.4.2. Love is fire/ heat 27
2.4.3. Love is a social superior and opponent 27
2.4.4. Love is a valuable commodity 29
2.4.5. Love is natural/ physical forces 30
2.4.6. Love is a fluid in a container 31
2.4.7. Love is a journey 31
2.4.8. Love is a nutrient 33
2.4.9. Love is rapture 34
2.4.10. Love is insanity 35
2.4.11. Love is a unity (of two complementary parts) 35
PART III: CONCLUSION 37
1. Major findings 37
2. Implications 38
3. Suggestions for further study 39
REFERRENCES…………………………………………………………………………………… 40
APPENDIX…………………………………………………………………………………… I

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PART I: INTRODUCTION
1. Rationale
Language is a means to express people‟s thought. It is also used to express people‟s
emotions, feelings including love, hate, anger, etc. In Talmy‟s view, language is a major
cognitive system in its own right, distinct from the other major ones: perception, reasoning,
affect, attention, memory, cultural structure, and motor control. As such, language has some
structural properties that are uniquely its own and some others that are in common either with
only a few other cognitive systems, or with all other cognitive systems (Talmy, 2000a: 16).
In recent years, the study of emotions has been one of the most important areas of research
in the Social Sciences.
Expressing love is not an easy task and different languages may have different

mapping exercise from a source domain (in this case, journeys) to a target domain (in this case
love). Entities in the domain of love correspond systematically to entities in the domain of a
journey (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980: 207-208).
Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 29) claim that “…most of our non-physical reality is structures,
understood, and created by metaphors…” We come to know our thoughts and feelings by
analogy to the physical world. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) proposed that metaphor was a basis
structure of understanding through which we conceptualize on domain (the target domain
which is unfamiliar or abstract) in terms of another (the source domain, most often familiar
and concrete).
In short, the conceptual metaphor of love is conventional in different languages, so I
applied the theory of conceptual metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Lakoff & Turner, 1989;
Lakoff, 1993, 1987; Kovecses, 2002) to the study of recognition of metaphors of love in some
English expressions of love. It is expected that this study will provide invaluable
understanding of correspondence between the domain of love experience and another domain
of experience.
2. Aims of the study
The present study aims at studying the conceptualization of the noun love in some English
expressions of love. The qualities of love are identified in English based on analyzing the data
under the study.
3. Scope of the study
This study focuses on investigating how love is conceptualized in English evidenced in
115 English expressions of love.
There are three different categories according to the function of metaphors: Structural,
orientaitonal, and ontological metaphors (Kovecses, 2002: 32, 33). In this study, structural
metaphors was used as the analytical framework.

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4. Research question
The question addressed in this study is:
- How is love conceptualized in English evidenced in some English expressions of love?

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PART II: DEVELOPMENT
CHAPTER 1: THEORITICAL BACKGROUND
In this study, cognitive semantics, especially the theory of cognitive metaphor is the main
interest which provides gateways for the understanding and analysis of linguistics expressions
containing the word love which are the object of the study. This chapter explores the field of
cognitive semantics, thus enabling the writer to provide a thorough theoretical framework or
background for the study.
1.1. Cognitive semantics
A new semantic theory, called cognitive semantics, has been developed (Lakoff, 1987;
Langacker, 1986, 1987; Croft and Cruse, 2004; Evans, 2006). The prime slogan for cognitive
semantics is: Meanings are in the head. More precisely, semantics for a language is seen as a
mapping from the expressions of the language to some cognitive or mental entities. Langacker
(1986a: 3) formulates it crisply: “Meaning is equated with conceptualization.” This paradigm
of semantics is thus conceptualistic or cognitivistic. It rejects the formal traditions of
attributing linguistics into phonology, syntax, pragmatics, etc., and that the meaning is
independent from syntax. Moreover, cognitive semantics states that meanings come from our
mind; or rather, meanings are in the head (Gardenfors, 1994).
An important tenet of cognitive semantics is that the structures in our heads that are
carrying the meanings of words are of the same nature as those that are created when we
perceive- when we see, hear, touch, etc. different things. (Gardenfors, 2007: 58).
Cognitive semantics is concerned with investigating the relationship between experience,
the conceptual system, and the semantic structure encoded by language. In specific terms,
scholars working in cognitive semantics investigate knowledge representation (conceptual
structure), and meaning construction (conceptualization). Cognitive semanticists have
employed language as the lens through which these cognitive phenomena can be investigated.
Consequently, research in cognitive semantics tends to be interested in modeling the human
mind as much as it is concerned with investigating linguistic semantics (Vyvyan, 2007).
Cognitive semantics has established close ties between semantics and cognition.
Cognitive semantics as a multi-disciplinary theory of language attempts to describe language

what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor.
They (1980) also identify metaphor as a transfer between the source domain and the
target domain. This has become known as the “two-domain theory” of metaphor. The
cognitive view on metaphor regards it as cognitive mechanism whereby one conceptual
domain (source domain) is partially mapped, that is, projected, onto another conceptual
domain (target domain). The target domain (abstract conceptual reality) is then understood in

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terms of the source domain (physical reality). According to Lakoff (1994: 43), metaphor is
thus “a cross-domain mapping in the conceptual system”. Let‟s look at the examples:
Life is difficulty.
Love is a journey.
Argument is war.
Anger is a hot fluid in a container.
As we can see in the examples above, life, love, argument and anger are target domain,
while difficulty, journey, war and a hot fluid in a container are source domain (Kovecses,
2002: 6). In order to understand the target domain in terms of source domain, we have to have
appropriate knowledge of the source domain (Lakoff & Turner, 1989: 60).
To sum up, according to Lakoff and Johnsons‟ research (1980), from everyday
expressions we know that most of our concepts are partially understood in terms of other
concepts and that most of human beings‟ normal conceptual system is metaphorical.
Lakoff and Johnson identify three types of metaphors: structured, orientational and
ontological. In the following sections, a brief discussion of each type of metaphor will be
outlined.
1.2.1. Structural metaphors
According to Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 40) state that structural metaphor refers to a
conceptual metaphor that is constructed from one conceptual structure to another. In other
words, in the structural metaphor model, one concept is understood and expressed in terms of
another structured, sharply defined concept. With the help of the structural metaphor, we can
use the words concerning one concept to talk about another concept. For instance, war is a

35).
Conceptual metaphors are understood as cognitive devices which provide a link between
the concrete knowledge of the world people hold in their memory and the figurative meaning
of a given expression. Some of the most typical conceptual metaphors that characterize
emotions include as the followings (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; and Kovecses, 1986):
LOVE IS A CONTAINER: He is in love; He entered a state of euphoria; We are out of
trouble now; etc (Lakoff 1980: 32) clearly show that we conceptualize our emotions and states
as a container and conceptualize what we feel and experience as being inside it (Lakoff 1980:
30).This type of metaphor turns our experiences into objects or substances. So in English we
can say we‟re “in love”, which suggests we‟re in a container called “love”. What‟s more, we
can have a “falling out”, when we fall out of the container metaphorically speaking.
LOVE IS A JOURNEY: Look how far we have; We are at a crossroads; We shall just
have to go our separate ways; I do not think this relationship is going anywhere; Where are
we?; We are stuck; We have gotten off the track (Lakoff 1980:44-45).Who loved, who has

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loved, who is loving, all find that “The course of true love never did run smoothly”
(Shakespeare). In English this metaphor is not homogeneous in nature, as it refers to different
kinds of journeys. “Car trip: It‟s been a long, bumpy road; Train trip: We‟ve gotten off the
tracks; Sea voyage: Our marriage is on the rocks”, the fact that they “are all journey
metaphors, makes them coherent” (Lakoff 1980:45).
LOVE IS A FLUID IN A CONTAINER: Warm feelings welled up inside him; He
poured out his affections on her; She couldn't hold in her love for him any longer (Kovecses;
2002). Love as well as the passion, when reaching a limit, must find a way out. Thus the
correspondences with the two domains and structured and we get metaphorical entailment or
carryover from the source domain to the target domain: when the intensity of love increases,
the fluid rises
LOVE IS MADNESS: I am crazy about her; She drives me out of my mind; He has
gone mad over her; I am just wild about Harry; I am insane about her; (Lakoff & Johnson;
1980: 49). Wild, mad, angry and crazy are well-understood by us. We do not have any

Gevaert, 2005).
LOVE IS A NUTRIENT: She's starved for affection; He’s love-starved; He hungered
for love (Kovevses, 1986). Here love is represented as necessary sustenance. The nutrient
metaphor for love utilizes chiefly the “hunger/ thirst” and the corresponding “desire/ effect”
aspect of the concept nutrient.
LOVE IS A BOND: There is a close tie between them; She has an attachment to him;
There are romantic ties between them; There is something between them (Kovecses; 1987).
Love is represented as a physical connection between the lovers.
LOVE IS A VALUABLE COMMODITY (IN AN ECONOMIC EXCHANGE): I gave
her all my love; I didn't get much in return; What am I getting out of this relationship
anyway?; I am putting more into this than you are; She's invested a lot in that relationship
(Kovecses, 1986). These metaphors express how love can be given, handed over, and assigned
a value. As a commodity that can be exchanged, people expect to receive something back (that
is love) when they give it away. Love is represented as a valuable substance to be traded, thus
entailing mutuality of the trade and comparability of the amounts traded.
LOVE IS A SOCIAL SUPERIOR AND OPPONENT: She was ruled by her emotions;
His emotions dominate his actions; She was struggling with her feelings of love; He was
seized by emotion (Kovecses, 2000: 70). In this metaphor, we have two forces: the superior
that is the emotion and the inferior that corresponds to the person. Here love is represented as
a foe in a fight, such that winning the fight represents maintaining control over one's feelings
of love and losing or surrendering represents loss of control. According to Kovecses (2000:
70): “This metaphor primarily applies to a person whose behavior is controlled by emotion,

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not by reason… A superior has long-term control over an inferior, whose behavior over a long
period of time.”
LOVE IS A PATIENT: This is a sick relationship; They have a strong, healthy
marriage; We are getting back on our feet; Their marriage is on its last legs; It is a tired
affair; It takes time to cure one’s heart (Lakoff 1980:49). Obviously, it is folly to pretend that
one wholly recovers from a disappointed passion. Such wounds always leave a scar. Most of

love wasn't successful; You're lucky to have found her (Kovecses, 1986). In this kind of
metaphor, love is represented as a hidden object to be sought after.
LOVE IS A PLANT: Their love just begins to sprout lately; My love for him has grown
gradually; Their love has yielded positive results; Her love starts to root (Lai and Ahrens,
2001). Love as a plant is a conventional metaphor in which an idea is thought of as a plant in
comparisons such as the following: the stages of growth and fruition of the plant represent the
stages of development of an emotion and the branches represent relates disciplines (Lakoff &
Johnson, 1980). This metaphor also states that love is understood as plant because plants
involve physical growth and love involves emotional growth.
LOVE IS A COLLABORATIVE WORK OF ART: This metaphor is unconventional
metaphor. It is the product of two ordinary people attempting to make sense of their everyday
love experience (Kovecses, 2002: 36). This emphasizes the more action- oriented aspect of it.
If love is a collaborative work of art, the two lovers should be able to work out their common
goals, the premises of the work, the responsibilities that they do or do not share. The
unconventionality of this conceptual metaphor is shown by the fact that Lakoff and Johnson
(1980) do not provide any metaphorical linguistic expressions to demonstrate it. The reason is
that there are no such conventionalized expressions (Kovecses, 2002).
LOVE IS MAGIC: She cast her spell over me; The magic is gone; I was spellbound;
She had me hypnotized; He has me in trance; I am charmed by him; She is bewitching
(Lakoff 1980:49). For centuries humans have been fascinated with things connected with
magic, as it provided the explanation for the unknown. We are unlikely to find out how the
very sensation of love appears, that is why we call it magic. This metaphor is extremely
productive in English, moreover, the verbs to hypnotize, to cast spell are most commonly used
when talking about women‟s ability to charm men, and not vice versa.
1.2.2. Orientational metaphors
Another kind of the cognitive metaphor which Lakoff and Johnson have called is
orientational metaphor. They claim that “one that does not structure one concept in terms of
another but instead organizes a whole system of concept with respect to one another” and
“Spatial orientations arise from the fact that we have bodies of the sort we have and that they


is meant (Kovecses, 2002: 34). Ontological metaphors provide a more delineated structure to
undesignated experiences. The following examples illustrate the way in which these
metaphors are used.

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(1) My fear that she should leave proved to be totally unfounded. (referring)
(2) She is full of hatred for the one who killed her friend. (quantifying)
(3) The enormity of the task caused him to quit the job. (identifying cause)
(4) The brutality of the genocide shocked people all over the world. (identifying aspects)
Lakoff & Johnson (1980) assert that people hardly notice metaphors such as these,
because they are so basic to everyday conceptualization and functioning. They are
nevertheless a means by which people understand either non-physical or not clearly bounded
things as entities.
Understanding our experiences in terms of objects and substances allow us to pick out
parts of our experience and treat them as discrete entities or substances of a uniform kind.
Container metaphor is the most typical kind of ontological metaphor. We are physical beings,
bounded and separated from the rest of the world by the surface of our skins, and we
experience the rest of the world outside us. According to Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 29) “Each
of us is a container, with a bounding surface and an in-out orientation. We project our own in-
out orientation onto other physical objects that are bounded by surfaces.” Thus we also view
them as containers with an inside and an outside. Let‟s look at examples below:
(1) He is out of sight.
(2) We‟re out of trouble now.
(3) He fell in love with him.
In the above examples, sight, trouble, and love are all abstract concepts which are
metaphorically viewed as concrete concept being boundaries.
Moreover, Kovecses (2002: 35) expresses the opinion that personification is to be
conceived of as a form of ontological metaphor. Personification is an ontological metaphor
which allows us to use knowledge of itself to maximal effect, to use insights to help them
comprehend such things as forces of nature, common events, abstract concepts, and inanimate

clue for purposes in our daily life as destinations of a journey.
According to Lakoff (1987), these image schemas might be so deeply grounded in
common human experience that they constitute universal linguistic cognitive structures. Many
of the schemas clearly derive from the most immediate of all our experience of the human
body.
Johnson (1987) explained the mechanism of transfer from some domains into more
abstract domains. According to this author, there are metaphors that map image into abstract
domains, preserving their basic logic. The metaphors used are not arbitrary but motivated by
structures inherent in everyday bodily experience.

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1.4. Collocation
In recent linguistic studies, the term “collocation” is often associated with Firth (1957).
Firth maintains that meaning by collocation is lexical meaning “at the syntagmatic level”.
Firth (1951, quoted in Palmer, 1981: 75) claimed that: “You shall know a word by the
company it keeps” and this keeping company- collocation, he called, was part of the meaning
of a word.”
Collocation, as is defined by Robbins (1989: 65), is the habitual association of a word in
a language with other particular words in sentences. Leech (1974: 20) also discusses
collocative meaning. He holds that collocative meaning comprises the associations a word
acquires by virtue of the meanings of words which are likely to occur in its environment.
Palmer (1981: 76) argues that collocation is not simply a master of association of ideas;
it is sometimes fairly idiosyncratic and cannot be predicted by virtue of the meaning of the
associated words. For example, white pain is common enough to say, but white milk is not,
though milk is white; and blond hair is acceptable while blond door is not, though with the
same color. Other examples are those of “rancid” and “addle” meaning stale, rotten, bad:
“rancid” collocating only with bacon and butter, “addle” with brains and eggs, and “milk”
with neither “rancid” nor “addle” but with sour.
In Baker‟s discussion of collocation (1992: 49), every lexeme can be said to have a
collocational range, which refers to the set of collocates or other words typically associated

Especially, we will deal with one emotion, which has been, in the history of mankind in
Western culture, really important (Oatley, 2004). We refer to love, understood in the broadest
sense. Love has helped to define the essence of human-beings. Without a history of love and
lovers, we would know nothing on how to cope with such a fundamental emotion as well as on
why this particular emotion has been investigated in its many facets and the strength of the
interest when it comes to the relationship between emotions and language.
Collins Cobuild Dictionary (2003: 855) defines love as a very strong feeling of affection
towards someone whom you are romantically or sexually attracted to.
The instances of the noun love were first categorized according to their participants, at
least one of whom (or which) experiences love, and one is the target/cause(r) object of love,
mutually being ideal. The notion of participant domains is included in the definitions, because
one cannot always strictly pinpoint who or what (animal, imaginary being, etc.) is
experiencing the motion, while it does tend to be possible to say whether the love being
expressed concerns romance or family relationships, for example. The definitions of these
kinds of love run as follow (Tissari, 2003: 2, 260-361).

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(a) The participants of family love (storge) are members of the same family. This love
occurs in the participant domain of family.
(b) The participants of marital love (storge-eros) are spouses. This love occurs in the
participant domain of marriage.
(c) The participants of sexual love (eros) are (potential) lovers. This love occurs in the
participant domain of sexuality.
(d) The participants of friendship love (philia) are neither members of the same family,
spouses of one another, or (potential) lovers, but this love occurs in the domain of friendship,
between people share thoughts and interests, or out of a wish to do something good to another
human being.
(e) The participants of religious love (agape) include God, or a god, at least indirectly
through a divine command or inspiration, and this love occurs between a human and a divine
being, or pertains to someone who acts out of faith.

In this analysis which follows, I concentrate on the basic noun love in some set
expressions. The metaphors containing the word love in expressions are especially typical,
while the verb is much more seldom accompanied.
An inventory of more than 115 English expressions used to talk about the emotion love
in English was compiled from dictionaries and some plays of Shakespeare, more than 20
expressions of love have been collected from the plays, such as Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet,
Othello, Two Noble Kinsmen, Richard III, Taming, and Coriolonus. In the novels, love is
appeared in many expressions. Moreover, the data is also compiled from the website
http://www.quotegarden.com/love.htm, accessed on July 8
th
, 2010. This website collects and
acknowledges many expressions of love. Some Vietnamese expressions are found to compare
with the conceptualization of love in the English expressions.
The expressions in the data were grouped into source domains (container, fire/ heat,
social superior or opponent, valuable commodity, natural/ physical forces, fluid in a container,
journey, nutrient, rapture, insanity, and unity of two complementary parts). The following part
represents the analytical framework to analyze the data.
2.3. Analytical framework
According to structural metaphor theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980 and Kovecses,
1986), love is conceptualized as journey, war, container, a fluid in a container, natural/
physical forces, rapture, insanity, captive animal, nutrient, valuable commodity, war, patient,
madness, magic, unity of two complementary, fire/ heat, social superior or opponent, hidden
object, and collaborative work. In the following section, the details of all the source domains
will be outlined. 26
2.3.1. Love is a container
The meaning of container is understood or implied when love is used with prepositions
such as “in” and “out”. For instance, “A man falls in love through his eyes, a woman through

The meaning of rapture is understood or implied when love is used with the verbs such
as intoxicate or drunk and the adjectives such as giddy, high, ecstasy, silly or irresistible. For
example, “He is intoxicated with love.” or “Anyone can be passionate, but it takes the real
love to be silly.”
2.3.7. Love is natural/ physical forces
The meaning of natural force or physical force is understood when love is combined with
the verbs such as carry away, attract, revolve, take away, touch, restrain, or open, for
example, “She was carried away by love.” or “If love has touched you, naught remain but
so.” Also, in this kind of metaphor love is collocated with the nouns such as electricity,
energy, misty rains, flood or atmosphere, for example “Let your love be like the misty rains,
coming softly, but flooding the river.”
2.3.8. Love is fire/ heat
Love is used as fire or heat when it is combined with the verbs such as burn, scorch, stir
up, ignite, put out, warm, melt, kindle, consume, throb, or light. For example: “Love burns
across the infinitude.” or “His love has warmed my heart.” It is also used with the nouns, for
instance, smoke or flame. Let‟s see the examples: “Love is a smoke made with the fume of
sigh.” or “Love must be as much as light, as it is flame.”
2.3.9. Love is a nutrient
The meaning of a nutrient is understood when love is collocated with the verbs such as
starve, live, need, scoop or thrive. For instance, “I cannot live without love.” or “Scoop love
from him.” Moreover, the nouns like refreshment, hunger, vitamin, or food are used to
understand love as a nutrient, for instance, “The hunger for love is much more difficult to
remove than the hunger for bread.” or “Love is the greatest refreshment in life.”
2.3.10. Love is a valuable commodity (in an economic exchange)
Love is conceptualized as a valuable commodity when it is collocated with the verbs and
the nouns, such as give, get, exchange, invest, lose, buy or get out of. For instance, “Success;
happiness and the ability to give and receive love all hinge on our relationship.”, “Love is
neither bought nor sold.” or “Love is priceless.”
2.3.11. Love is a social superior and opponent
Love is implied as a social or superior and opponent when it is used with the verbs such

Love is conceptualized as magic when it is combined with the verbs in the expressions
such as spellbind, hypnotize, entranced, charm, or bewitch, for example “I am charmed by
her love.”, and love is also conceptualized as a magician, for example “Love is the magician
that pulls man out of his own hat.”