Cognitive Linguistics. The Conceptualisation of Happiness
Author
Summary, in English
In today’s society there is an obsession with finding happiness. According
to the coca-cola company, all you need to do is open happiness1, but why
stop with a can of coke when you can find your happiness on a dating site.
It even seems to come in edible form in your local shop. But what exactly
is happiness?
De Saussure spoke of “the arbitrary nature of the sign” as a two part
model; “the signified” and “the signifier”. The sign itself is a result of these
two parts and can take form as words, sounds, images, smells and more
(Saussure 1983:67). “The signified” represents the concept, almost like a
mental picture, and “the signifier” represents the form, that is the actual
word. Hence, to understand the full concept of happiness not only the
words needs to be analyzed but also the mental picture associated with the
word.
Trough the methods of Cognitive Linguistics this paper will try to
examine the concept of happiness by looking at the tree lexemes;
happiness, blissful and joyful. It will try to determine if the three lexemes
are used differently when speaking of happiness. In order to capture the
full concept, the corpus analysis will contain both examples from a blog
corpus and images from Google.
to the coca-cola company, all you need to do is open happiness1, but why
stop with a can of coke when you can find your happiness on a dating site.
It even seems to come in edible form in your local shop. But what exactly
is happiness?
De Saussure spoke of “the arbitrary nature of the sign” as a two part
model; “the signified” and “the signifier”. The sign itself is a result of these
two parts and can take form as words, sounds, images, smells and more
(Saussure 1983:67). “The signified” represents the concept, almost like a
mental picture, and “the signifier” represents the form, that is the actual
word. Hence, to understand the full concept of happiness not only the
words needs to be analyzed but also the mental picture associated with the
word.
Trough the methods of Cognitive Linguistics this paper will try to
examine the concept of happiness by looking at the tree lexemes;
happiness, blissful and joyful. It will try to determine if the three lexemes
are used differently when speaking of happiness. In order to capture the
full concept, the corpus analysis will contain both examples from a blog
corpus and images from Google.
Department/s
Publishing year
2010
Language
English
Full text
- Available as PDF - 767 kB
- Download statistics
Document type
Student publication for Bachelor's degree
Topic
- Languages and Literatures
Supervisor
- Dylan Glynn