The EMOTION-IS-LIQUID Metaphor in English and Vietnamese: A Contrastive Analysis

Based on Lakoff's conceptual metaphor theory and Kovecses’ basic emotion terms, this pilot research found that English and Vietnamese share the conceptual metaphor EMOTION IS LIQUID. For each basic emotion term, the proportion of the EMOTION IS LIQUID expressions to the total of emotion tokens was relatively small. The translation of one language to the other fell into the same conceptual metaphor. Examples were collected from the Corpus of Contemporary American English, the World Wide Web, and the VietnameseWaC corpus. An implication for English teaching is to categorize expressions into different conceptual metaphors to enhance learners’ word choice.