PROJECT COMPLETED (2015)

Emotions are a pervasive aspect of experience, but they cannot be conceived and expressed in and of themselves. Because of their complexity, the expression of emotions is necessarily structured through more clearly delineated concepts, such as bodily sensations ("burning with desire") or simple perceptions, such as continents or the movement of objects ("full of anger"). This makes emotion a classic example of a metaphorical concept.

Metaphorical concepts differ between cultures, epochs and discursive genres. At the same time, they are based on universal connections between mental Structures . The finding of these connections, also known as conceptual projections or mapping, has been one of the major breakthroughs in cognitive science and linguistics. Through mapping, the mind projects information from one conceptual domain to another.

EMOCCC studies how affective meanings emerge from the interaction of ingrained conceptual models and ad-hoc creativity. Through a detailed comparison of emotion concepts and their expression across languages and periods, the project seeks to understand how our cognitive capacities for conceptual integration, outline of image and conceptualframework drive human imagination and reasoning, enabling us to craft mental simulations or images with powerful aesthetic and conceptual meaning.

Emotions in Greek poetry and beyond

In the current phase, EMOCCC is conducting a diachronic study of the poetic expression of selected emotions in Greek poetry, from Homer to the present. The main focus is on new meanings that combine spatial events (movement, containment, occlusion) with mental entities that go beyond the spatial, such as a scene in which two people interact in typical ways (looking, talking, gesturing).

The integration of these and other conceptual materials allows the poets to suggest novel situations in which feelings become part of "non-emotional" events, such as emitting light, throwing objects, blocking a path, entering or leaving places, among others. Giving rise to a variety of mental images through figurative language, these texts turn complex or novel concepts into images, thus converting vague or abstract notions about feelings into vivid scenes that can be seen in the mind's eye.

The twenty-eight centuries of uninterrupted Greek literary tradition offer the broadest field for diachronic analysis of conceptual patterns and creativity in the poetic expression of emotions. EMOCCC will study these patterns and their creative use within diverse cultural settings through a wide selection of poetic texts in ancient and modern Greece. This study will serve as the basis for a large-scale study of the verbal expression of emotions in the major European languages, which will contrast the poetic speech with everyday language. For the comparative study of the language of poetic emotion across literary traditions, it will create a database. For the analysis of the expression of emotion in everyday language, the NewsScape Library of International Television News, developed by the network Hen Lab for the study of multimodal communication, will be used.