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Emotions are abstract, culture-tinged constructs that are difficult to define. As a consequence, their linguistic analysis is particularly arduous. Because of its inherent definitional ambiguity, the language of emotion builds upon metaphors of the physical realm, and these metaphors in turn demonstrate a culture’s way of defining a particular emotion. Unfortunately, the communication of emotion and its metaphors remains undocumented in many of the world’s languages, which has led to linguistic and cultural biases in many scientific studies of emotion. This study aims to highlight this issue and contribute to the clarification of its parameters by documenting the metaphorical characteristics of the idiom of love in spoken standard Italian. The documentation derives from an array of field-gathered linguistic expressions used by Italians to convey love and from the qualitative analysis of the metaphorical constructs providing the context for describing such emotions across age and gender. |
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