Anxiety's idealized cognitive model, and the shipment metaphor

Abstract

This paper addresses the conceptualization of anxiety in Brazilian Portuguese. The approach is centered on cognitive linguistics and on the MIP methodology. The corpus is divided as follows: a) journalistic texts taken from online newspapers; and b) sentences collected from web search tools. We identified two-framed metaphorical lexical units - emotion and disease. Three anxiety-related concepts were distinguished: desire, fear, and expectation. Such concepts indicated that pathological anxiety is often determined by the conjunction of expectation and fear, while the emotional anxiety may be determined by the same conjunction, or by the conjunction of desire and expectation. In terms of conceptual metaphor, there is a notion of a spatialization of time (TIME IS SPACE), and a notion of entification of event (EVENT IS OBJECT). Together, these conceptualizations suggest a mental state structured by the “receiver (someone)” and the “one shipment (something)” elements.