Anger is a basic emotion that informs and guides many of our choices and actions. The conceptualization of ANGER has been widely studied in cognitive linguistics, from Lakoff and Kövecses (1987), who examined the universal and embodied foundations of ANGER metaphors, to later research on cross-linguistic and diachronic variation (Gevaert 2005; Geeraerts and Gevaert 2008; Rajeg and Rajeg 2023). However, due to the scarcity of contrastive studies and the lack of a unified methodology, the issue of the universality versus variation of ANGER conceptualization remains unresolved. Addressing this gap, Metaphors of ANGER across Languages: Universality and Variation provides the most comprehensive cross-linguistic account to date. Integrating lexical-based and corpus-based approaches, it identifies recurrent metaphorical patterns and language-specific mappings across twenty-five languages, and investigates how ANGER conceptualization is shaped through the interplay of bodily experience, language and cultural context.

This two-volume book comprises 27 chapters, including 25 empirical studies covering languages from eleven language families, as well as an introductory and a concluding chapter. Volume 1 examines the conceptualization of ANGER in Akan, American English, Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Dalabon, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian and Italian, while volume 2 extends the investigation to Japanese, Kabyle, Korean, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Swahili, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian. For a detailed overview of each chapter and information on the authors, please refer to the following link due to space limitations: https://www.degruyterbrill.com/serial/moa-b/html.

Across these chapters, the volume addresses a set of core research concerns, including the salience of metaphor and metonymy, the dimensions of ANGER metaphors, the metonymic basis of ANGER metaphors, cultural models, the role of context in shaping ANGER metaphors, and the methodological apparatus.

To facilitate systematic comparison across languages, the book proposes a combined methodological framework integrating a lexical-based approach with a corpus-based approach. Specifically, the lexical approach identifies conventionalized expressions associated with the concept of ANGER through dictionary and lexical resources (e.g., WordNet), including synonyms, related words, idioms, phrases, and collocations. In the corpus-based approach, ANGER-related keywords were used to extract data from the largest and most representative corpora of each language. For each keyword, a sample of 1,000 randomly selected instances of metaphorical and metonymic usage is analyzed.

The results from twenty-five languages show that the corpus-based approach and the lexical-based approach effectively identify ANGER metaphors but produce different patterns of metaphorical salience. The lexical-based approach yields specific metaphorical source domains, such as FIRE, DANGEROUS ANIMAL, and HOT FLUID. By contrast, the corpus-based approach identifies highly schematic source domains, such as OBJECT, RESOURCE, and QUANTITY. From a cross-linguistic perspective, the combined results show that FIRE and SICKNESS emerge as the most salient metaphorical source domains, attested in 24 languages. With respect to metonymy, PHYSICAL AGITATION emerges as the most salient metonymic source domain, occurring in 22 languages. More broadly, two cross-linguistically recurrent types of metonymy can be distinguished: body-/physiology-based metonymy and social-communicative metonymy. Crucially, these metaphorical and metonymic patterns do not operate in isolation. In conceptualizing ANGER, the boundary between metaphor and metonymy is often blurred, particularly when metonymic foundations underlie apparently metaphorical expressions, a phenomenon known as metaphtonymy (Goossens 2003). In line with this, the volume addresses the motivational basis of conceptual metaphors (Lakoff and Kövecses 1987). Evidence from cross-linguistic data demonstrates that metonymic foundations typically motivate and give rise to metaphorical constructions. For example, in American English (Chapter 3), the FIRE metaphor is motivated by metonymic responses such as body heat and facial redness.

Subsequently, after identifying the salient metaphors and metonymies, the “main meaning focus” and cultural model were analyzed across twenty-five languages. These analyses reveal more fine-grained aspects of ANGER metaphors. The investigation of “main meaning focus” includes cause, beginning, intensity, control, evaluation, and action. For a given language, even when the same metaphors are identified by both methods, they may reveal different meaning foci. For example, the (UN)VEILED OBJECT metaphorical source domain is identified by both methods in Indonesian (Chapter 14): the lexical-based approach highlights “regulating anger”, whereas the corpus-based approach emphasizes “expressing anger”. Cultural models are used to describe a sequence of stages of ANGER, including cause, existence, control, expression, and action (Kövecses 1990, 184–185). Among these, “control” emerges as a crucial aspect across languages examined. While the stages within a cultural model are broadly shared across languages, they also exhibit variation. For example, Japanese (Chapter 16) displays a distinctive cultural model consisting of the following stages: cause, existence of anger, digestive symptoms, successful control, and the subsiding of anger. This pattern is influenced by language-specific bodily experiences in Japanese.

The final section of each chapter examines how bodily experience, language, and cultural context interact in the conceptualization of ANGER across languages. The findings show that the emergence of ANGER metaphors is shaped by a range of contextual factors, including general contextual factors like the theory of the four humors (e.g., many Indo-European languages) and religion (e.g., Italian, Kabyle, and Russian), as well as language-specific contextual factors, such as geo-physical context (e.g., Akan, Arabic) and ancient philosophy (e.g., Chinese).

Overall, this book offers a systematic cross-linguistic exploration of the metaphorical and metonymical conceptualization of ANGER across twenty-five languages, providing an unprecedentedly comprehensive understanding of this emotion and yielding important insights that advance the theoretical and methodological development of conceptual metaphor and metonymy. Theoretically, the book deepens our understanding of the universality and variation of conceptual metaphors. On the one hand, the book challenges the view that certain metaphors are grounded in universally shared embodied and physiological motivations (e.g., Lakoff and Kövecses 1987). It further shows that physiological foundations previously assumed to be universal display systematic cross-linguistic variation. Different languages show a preference for different physiological systems in conceptualizing ANGER, which in turn shapes the distribution of ANGER metaphors. For example, most Indo-European languages show a stronger reliance on the cardiovascular system, with ANGER IS FIRE emerging as the most salient metaphor, whereas Japanese shows a greater preference for the gastrointestinal system, with IKARI IS A SUBSTANCE IN A DIGESTIVE ORGAN as the most salient metaphor. On the other hand, the book refines earlier claims concerning the universal status of specific metaphorical source domains, demonstrating that no single metaphor is attested in every language. Rather, a graded category is proposed in the book to account for the potential universality of conceptual metaphor, in which metaphors vary in their cross-linguistic and cross-cultural prevalence. Moreover, the book highlights the complementary roles of conceptual metaphor and metonymy in the conceptualization of ANGER across languages. These results show that both metaphors and metonymies contribute substantially to shaping the concept of ANGER, although they are not equally important in performing this function, as they address different aspects of abstract concepts. Furthermore, the book deepens our understanding of metonymy as a “motivation for metaphor” by providing empirical evidence that most metaphorical source domains are motivated by metonymies.

Methodologically, the book is the first to combine lexical- and corpus-based approaches in a cross-linguistic comparison of the metaphorical conceptualization of ANGER, thereby addressing a longstanding limitation of their separate application in previous cross-linguistic studies. It demonstrates both the feasibility and value of combining the two methods, showing that they are complementary: lexical-based approach captures more specific and fine-grained metaphors, whereas corpus-based approach reveals more general patterns. Moreover, this book provides a more systematic and transparent way to operationalize the notion of “salience” by calculating an “aggregate” value. Specifically, in the lexical-based approach, the aggregate value is defined as the sum of the “percentage of all types of linguistic expression” and the “percentage of all mappings of ANGER”. In the corpus-based approach, the aggregate value is calculated as the sum of the “percentage of all tokens”, “percentage of all types” and “percentage of all mappings”. Together, each of these approaches offers replicable and empirically falsifiable statistical methods for advancing research on conceptual metaphor and metonymy, as well as cross-linguistic studies.

Despite its strength, two minor issues may be noted. First, the focus remains largely synchronic, with relatively limited attention to diachronic variation, which previous studies have shown to be highly informative for metaphor research (e.g., Allan 2008; Gevaert 2005). Second, although the book adopts a corpus-based approach, the analysis relies primarily on descriptive statistics (e.g., frequency counts), without adopting a multifactorial usage-feature methodology. Previous studies have shown that corpus-based multifactorial analyses can reveal the complex conceptual structures of emotion and have been successfully applied to explore metaphorical structures of various emotions across cultures and languages (e.g., Glynn and Biryukova 2022; Nordmark and Glynn 2013; Ogarkova and Soriano 2014; Wu and Liu 2025). A more systematic application of statistical tools could objectively examine the interrelationship between metaphors, their meaning foci, and various contextual factors, thereby yielding results that are more empirically falsifiable and theoretically robust.

Overall, the two volumes offer a comprehensive and coherent examination of the ANGER conceptualization across 25 languages. The work establishes a consistent comparative framework and offers a valuable foundation for future research on other emotions and abstract concepts. It is an ideal resource for scholars and graduate students interested in Linguistics, Psychology, Anthropology, Sociology, and Cultural Studies.