2020
73
12102020
Inesa Šeškauskienė inesa.seskauskiene@flf.vu.lt
Vilnius University, Lituania
Abstract: Body part lexemes are among the most frequently metaphorised lexemes across languages and cultures. Heart is often conceptualised as a container for feelings and emotions, especially in Western languages and cultures. The paper sets out to examine a typical construction signalling the image schema of heart as a container: in the/my/his/ her heart in English and šird-yje (heart-LOC.SG) in Lithuanian to determine the relevance of the image schema for the semantics of the above construction, especially in reference to emotions and feelings. Also types of containers in each language are identified. The investigation is based on corpus data and the key principles of metaphor identification procedure. The results demonstrate that the construction is mostly used metaphorically in both languages and the container image schema is paramount in interpreting the semantics of the construction. It is employed in at least three senses: container for emotions and feelings, centrality and hiding. However, the distribution of the senses in the two languages is quite different with Lithuanian showing more adherence to the metaphor of a container for emotions and feelings and English giving preference to heart as centre of activity and attraction.
Keywords: metaphor, emotions, container image schema, English, Lithuanian.
Articles
Emotion or Reason? Heart as a Container in English and Lithuanian
Inesa Šeškauskienė inesa.seskauskiene@flf.vu.lt
Aprobación: 12 Octubre 2020
Ample literature demonstrates that human body parts are often employed to express abstract ideas, in other words, they are used metaphorically. Words such as nose, head, heart, and hand are frequently used in a figurative sense: heads refer to leaders and are associated with management (e.g. head of state), hearts highlight importance (e.g. heart of the problem), hands express control (e.g. the city fell into enemy hands), noses are linked to the ability to search and find something (e.g. he had a nose for a story), etc. Human body parts make the basis of numerous idioms and set expressions representing a largely “fossilised” layer of language (Deignan 2003); therefore, we often use such expressions as to lose one’s head, to have a nose for something, to lay one’s hands on something, to open one’s heart, etc. spontaneously, without giving them too much thought.
The phenomenon has been amply studied in a single language (mostly English, see, for example, Niemeier 2008) and cross-linguistically, with one language being English (see, for example, Fernando 1996; Racevičiūtė 2002; Nacey 2004; Kövecses 2006; Dobrovol’skij & Pamies 2011; Maalej &Yu 2011, among others) or across very different languages like German, Lithuanian and Georgian (Šileikaitė 2004). No less important cross-linguistic aspect is for those who are engaged in the study of language teaching and learning (e.g. Charteris-Black 2002) and dictionary making (Szczepaniak & Lew 2011).
The frequency of body parts employed to express abstractions has been, at least partially, explained by universal human experience (Lakoff & Johnson 2003), which is one of the key ideas underlying the Theory of Embodiment (Gibbs 2006; Johnson 2007), apparently operating in any human language. Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson 2003), eventually developed into Cognitive Metaphor Theory and gradually evolved into multi-faceted studies of metaphoricity, is another theory that gave rise to numerous interpretations attempting to account for abstract reasoning in terms of concrete items from immediate human experience and, more specifically, for the mechanism of semantic motivation of body-part idioms and collocations. The instrumentality of the theory in the study of idioms has been strongly supported by Dobrovol’skij and Piirainen (2005), even though they admit that to comprehensively study idioms, the theory is insufficient. The scholars point out the importance of “etymological memory”, which determines the behaviour of a lexical unit in discourse and may have synchronic relevance (Dobrovol’skij & Piirainen 2005, 27–28).
Moreover, more recent works on metaphors have demonstrated that in addition to the universal parameter of the human body and a clear tendency at embodying our thoughts and activities, it is important to take into consideration cultural variation of even the most universal metaphors. Kövecses (2008) singles out cross-cultural and within-culture dimension of variation, which, in his view, could help account for a huge diversity of metaphors across languages and cultures. To comprehensively study figurative language, according to Ibarrexe-Antuńano, means to study both the universal parameter of embodiment and a specific culture, which she metaphorically refers to as a ‘culture sieve’ (2013, 323).
Head and heartare among the most frequently used body part lexemes especially in idioms and set expressions. Since the times of Descartes, there has been a strongly advocated belief in European culture that head is primarily associated with reason and heart is reserved for feelings and emotions. The phenomenon is often referred to as head-heart dualism (Niemeier 2008, 2011) and is reflected in many European languages. Interestingly, at a closer look and based on linguistic data, in English the head-heart dualism is not as clear-cut. In Old and Middle English heart was the locus of rational thought (ibid., p. 356; see also Swan 2009). The view is reflected in the still very active expression to learn sth by heart, which might have evolved due to a strong influence of Norman French (Foolen 2008, 389). Other Germanic languages, like Dutch and German, seem to have preserved the same tendencies of development with heart prototypically associated with emotions and feelings and head with reason (ibid.).
Other languages like Lithuanian (Šileikaitė 2004) or even Basque (Ibarrexe–Antuńano 2013), in principle adhere to the above model. However, a more detailed examination shows a slightly different picture. Basque follows the dual model only at first sight (ibid.), the model is explainable by the influence of neighbouring Romance languages surrounding the region. At a closer look, heart in Basque is equally important for cognition as well as emotions (ibid., pp. 331–332). Cultures further from the Western world are even less likely to adhere to the cardiocentric approach. In Chinese, for example, heart is the locus of mental life (Yu 2011; 2020), in Indonesian liver seems to be the centre of emotions and reason, despite a strong influence of Western culture (Siahaan 2008). Liver is also very important for Malay, especially when talking about feelings and emotions where English would primarily employ heart (Charteris-Black 2002).
As already mentioned, heart is primarily associated with a place where emotions are kept. In a cognitive linguistic framework, advocating experiential approach to linguistic meaning, when conceptualising heart as a place we actually conceive of it as a fairly basic experiential image schema of a container (Lakoff 1987, 267). According to cognitive scholars, the human body can also be conceptualised as a container, which is reflected in linguistic data and is often treated as a universal image schema employed in human languages and cognition. We, as humans, also function within other objects as containers, such as rooms, buildings, forests (Kövecses 2006, 209), which may contain us or we contain other objects. The key elements of the container schema include interior, boundary and exterior. The schema seems to be paramount in many cultures and has numerous manifestations in languages, primarily in idioms and other metaphorical expressions.
Kövecses (2005, 37–38) provides a number of examples evidencing that the metaphor HAPPINESS IS A FLUID IN A CONTAINER (heart) is identifiable in such distant languages as Hungarian and Chinese. In Zulu it is given less prominence and is not associated with positive emotions (ibid., p. 69); rather than holding love and affection, in Zulu it is mostly employed as a carrier of anger and patience.
The importance of a container in reference to head and heart, first of all, in English, has been pointed out by Niemeier, who claimed that “the container metaphor, a very general if not universal metaphor, is active in the conceptualization of human mental faculties” (2008, 365). At a linguistic level, as claimed by the authors of today already well-known methodology of metaphor identification MIP (Pragglejaz Group 2007; Steen et al. 2010), the container image schema is prototypically signalled in English by the preposition in, especially when followed by an abstract word or in cases when abstract meaning is derivable from context. Interestingly, of all word classes, prepositions seem to be the most likely to be used metaphorically (Steen et al. 2010a, 203). The English preposition in in Lithuanian roughly corresponds to the Locative case (Urbonaitė, Šeškauskienė & Cibulskienė 2019, 173).
This paper addresses the claim that heart is the seat of, or container for, emotion, which, presumably, suggests that the English expression in one’s/the heart and the Lithuanian šird-yje (heart-LOC.SG), when used figuratively, mainly appear in emotion-related contexts. The hypothesis is tested on two languages: English and Lithuanian. More specifically, the key questions of the investigation are concerned with first, identifying the tendencies of metaphorical usage of the above construction in English and Lithuanian, assuming that the semantics of the construction is interpretable with reference to the underlying image schema of a container, second, specifying the type of a container in each language, and third, determining the extent of the conceptualisation of heart as a container for emotions in each language.
The data for the investigation has been collected from British National Corpus (BNC) and Contemporary Lithuanian Corpus (CLC). Both corpora meet the requirements of a representative corpus.
In the course of analysis, first, the above construction was identified, which in English typically consists of three words: the preposition in, a variable element in the middle, such as an article (mostly definite), a pronoun (this, my, his, her, our, etc.), or an adjective (sacred, bleeding), and the noun heart in the singular. In Lithuanian, the construction consists of a single word šird-yje (‘heart’ in the locative case singular), which made the search of the item much easier. The total number of in * heart in BNC amounted to 1,133; the number of širdyje in CLC was 3,396. In each corpus, 500 concordances were randomly selected for further study thus amounting to 1,000 of concordances in both languages.
The second stage of analysis consisted of manual identification of a further contextual element, semantically completing the construction, e.g. joy in my heart, pain in the heart and similar expressions in English and Lithuanian. At this stage, the meaning of the construction was defined either as metaphorical (e.g. joy in my heart) or not metaphorical (e.g. he was stabbed in the heart) and manually tagged in an Excel sheet. Also all metaphors were categorised according to type. Each concordance line was tagged in the Excel sheet depending on the identified sense.
The third stage of analysis was concerned with interpretation attempting to account for the tendencies of conceptualising heart in English and Lithuanian and across the two languages. For the second and third stages, there were several cognitively-oriented theories and principles applied. The most instrumental was the Embodiment Theory (Johnson 2007; Gibbs 2006; Gibbs et al. 2004; Hampe 2017), which adheres to the idea that human mind is embodied and that abstract thought to a very large extent relies on bodily experience. The theory helps account for cross-linguistically relevant conceptualisations (e.g. heart being the most important organ in the human body and its extensive usage to express the meaning of centrality). Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson 2003) and its further elaboration (Deignan 2003; Semino 2008; Kövecses 2010, among others) is key to many conceptualisations whereby we encode abstract ideas by referring to concrete, easily identifiable objects and phenomena from our everyday experience. Also the main principles of the Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP and MIPVU; Pragglejaz Group 2007; Steen et al. 2010; 2010a) helped identify metaphor in the text by consistently adhering to the idea that a physical sense (also more related to the human body) is always primary and abstract senses are derived from the physical sense.
The investigation of the heart construction in English and Lithuanian has revealed that in both sub-corpora, English and Lithuanian, the construction is mainly used metaphorically. As demonstrated in Table 1 below, in the English sub-corpus eight per cent of 500 cases have turned out to be non-metaphorical; in the Lithuanian sub-corpus—only three per cent. In English, the non-metaphorical usages were mostly medical and described someone’s medical condition, such as a pain in the heart, it was a factor in a heart disease, or referred to rough combat situations, resulting in rather unpleasant outcomes such as he was stabbed in the heart. There were a couple of cases where the construction was employed in titles and names, such as she refused to play in the Angel Hearts. In Lithuanian, non-figurative uses were exclusively medical, such as elektrinių impulsų sklidimo širdyje modelis ‘the model of propagation of electric impulses in the heart’ or uždegiminiai procesai širdyje ‘inflammatory processes in the heart’. The remaining metaphorical usages, 97% in English and 92% in Lithuanian, were categorised according to meaning into three senses: container for emotions and feelings, centre, and a hiding place. The three senses were relevant in both, English and Lithuanian, the only difference being a different distribution of senses in the two languages. The distribution is reflected in Table 1 below.
As seen in the above Table, English clearly gives preference to the conceptualisation of heart as a centre (42%), whereas in Lithuanian it is the least frequent pattern (5%). In English, the heart as centre outnumbers the best known pattern of heart as a container for emotions (31.2%), which clearly prevails in the Lithuanian data with more than half ‘emotional’ utterances (61%). Heart where thoughts and ideas, feelings and other manifestations of ‘inner’ life are hidden is identifiable in about one fifth of the data in English (18.6%) and about one third of the data in Lithuanian (31%). A more detailed analysis is provided below, with each metaphor discussed in a separate section starting with the typical, container for emotions, metaphor. All examples mentioned in the discussion of the results have been attested in BNC and CLC, unless indicated otherwise.
The sense has been probably best described in linguistic literature, especially in works dealing with emotion and idioms (see Niemeier 2008; 2011; Kövecses 2005, 2006; Piirainen 2011, among others); however, the description mostly relied on the data from general and specialised dictionaries and thesauri rather than corpora and actual usage. Previous research in principle confirmed a claim about emotions and feelings being mostly associated with heart and reason with head, at least in Western culture. One of the senses of the construction in * heart reflects the tendency as well. There are cases when reason (in one’s head) and emotions and feelings (in one’s heart) are explicitly juxtaposed, e.g.:
(1) She had to struggle to understand what she already knew about in her head,but not in her heart.
Despite that knowledge and understanding are concerned with the head, in the above example knowing in one’s heart is more important. Apparently, knowing in the heart is reinforced with emotion, which, again, has been supported by medical research and is not really surprising (see Niemeier 2008, 350). Actual usage data, providing an opportunity to see a more refined picture, shows that in the selected languages the emotion sense clearly stands out. What is a little unexpected is the difference between Lithuanian and English: the emotion sense is almost twice more frequent in Lithuanian (61%) than in English (31.2%). Lithuanian seems to also more prone to discuss negative rather than positive emotions in texts.
In both languages the sense is typically realised in utterances where the content in the heart-container is a whole range of emotions and feelings such as joy, love, pain, sadness, longing, confusion, hope, (dis)trust, peace, tenderness, etc. The emotion words are often explicitly mentioned or replaced by a person or a place, which are usually a source or cause of someone’s emotions. People (father in (3)) and places (Armenia in (2)) thus metonymically stand for emotions, e.g.:
(2) Armėnij-a lik-s mano šird-yje lyg švies-us žiburėl-is. Armenia-NOM.SG remain-FUT.3 my heart-LOC.SG like clear-NOM.SG light-NOM.SG ‘Armenia will remain in my heart like a clear light.’
(3) (…) it was fire directed at the father he carried in his heart, whom he still loved and admired despite everything.
What clearly makes the emotion sense stand out in the data is very vivid imagery employed in the expression of human emotions placed in the heart. In both languages the imagery comes from very different domains: nature, art, fire, fighting. Often the emotion word or the source of that emotion (a place, or a person) are not explicitly used and have to be recovered from context.
The imagery points at very interesting ways of conceptualising emotions in both languages and apparently contributes to the text more than one metaphor. In such a way, several metaphors are mixed, such as container and natural growing, fire and container, flood and container, a heavy object and a container, etc. The emotion could be personified and become a friend or a companion residing in one’s heart, the emotion could also become an object placed, left or kept in one’s heart. For example, negative emotions, such as sadness, tend to have weight, are heavy, which is an indication of an object metaphor; indirectly, it is also linked to the metaphor SAD IS DOwN, e.g.:
(4) Still the sadness weighed heavily in her heart.
(5) Jauči-a-me kažk-ą pa-dar-ę ne taip, šird-yje
feel-PRS-1.PL something-ACC.SG PFV-do-PST.PA.NOM.PL not right heart-LOC.SG
jauči-a-me sunkum-ą.
feel-PRS-1.PL heaviness-ACC.SG
‘We feel we have done something wrong, we feel heaviness in the heart.’
Another source of imagery prominently featuring in both languages is nature. So heart is a place to sow seeds or grow plants, especially flowers which eventually come to blossom, a place where ice is kept or melts, especially when bad emotions are replaced by remorse. Heart could be a place with a raging fire which cannot be extinguished in case of strong love or a place scattered with sunrays. In Lithuanian, a culture-specific image of a meadow of sow thistles in the heart was found. In spring, such meadows are spread all over Lithuania. In the Lithuanian sub-corpus, there were also several cases with an image of flowing water, which was not identified in English. Thus heart can be conceptualised as a natural container brimming with words, like water in a river dam, e.g.:
(6) At-plūd-o žodži-ų sraut-as, kuris jau ilgokai PFV-flood-PST.3 word-GEN.PL flow-NOM.SG which already long tvenk-ė-si šird-yje.
well_up-PST.3-REFL heart-LOC.SG
‘A flow of words suddenly came; it had long been welling up in my heart.’
In this sense, the usage of heart is closest to the body, especially in case of negative emotions. They can be the cause of physical pain and health problems eventually leading to bad emotions. The link is identifiable in expressions like a pain or twinge in one’s heart, which can have two readings—direct (physical) and figurative (emotional). The phenomenon was exhaustively described in literature (see Kövecses 2010). The imagery of fighting and combat is also a natural extension of physical situations when pain and wounds are inflicted; thus the image of a dagger in one’s heart, for example, can be understood as both—physical struggle and eventual physical damage and emotional suffering, e.g.:
(7) It was like dagger in my heart when you described working on them without my help.
The variety of images of what happens or is found in one’s heart when speaking about emotions is almost infinite. They include static images of landscape, fire, ice as well as more dynamic images of combat or any scene of human life, such as watering flowers, sowing seeds of hope, some object being torn into pieces, flickering curiosity, anger or fear, echoing voice, cats fighting, a discussion, etc. Even such activity as writing, or the image of words inscribed into one’s heart is found both in English and Lithuanian, especially in texts about religion, e.g.:
(8) Gandhi himself refers to Rāma as the all powerful essence whose name is inscribed in the heart.
(9) Diev-o Įstatym-as, į-rašy-t-as kiekvien-o žmog-aus God-GEN.SG Law-NOM.SG PFV-write-PP.PST-NOM.SG each-GEN.SG person-GEN.SG šird-yje.
heart-LOC.SG
‘The Law of God inscribed in the heart of each person.’
Apparently, the image of heart representing one’s emotional world is very stable, and it is reflected in both languages. As seen in a large variety of texts, the image is very creatively employed by individual writers in both languages, especially in fiction. There are no striking differences between the languages, except that the emotional sense of the construction in Lithuanian is much more productive than in English.
The metaphor underlying one of the senses of the construction is identifiable in both subcorpora; however, as already mentioned, in English, it is the most frequent conceptualisation accounting for 42% of all cases of in * heart. In a number of contexts, reference is made to the city centre, e.g.:
(10) (…) the princely town house stands beside a broad pond in the heart of the city.
Given that heart is a vital organ of the human body and in conformity with the Embodiment Theory, the transfer between the human heart and a central location in the surrounding world seems very logical. What in English is mostly conceptualised as having a ‘heart’, in addition to city, includes a large variety of locations like suburbs, quarters or districts, typical urban loci paramount for our orientation and strongly context-dependent, for example, London, London’s West End, Surrey, North Yorkshire, Manhattan, Moscow, Birmingham business quarter, West Berlin, Lagan Valley Regional Park, Ibiza’s historical capital, the South Ribble constituency, an environmentally sensitive area, rebel-held territory, etc. Most cases refer to geographical or more general descriptions where it is important to specify the location. Often such texts carry positive evaluation; being in the heart of some area is naturally seen as an advantage, especially in texts meant for tourists, e.g.:
(11) [T]he rural district of Ryedale in the heart of North Yorkshire covers six hundred square miles of dramatic scenery (…).
Centres of cities and towns are usually easily identifiable on maps and in tourist guidebooks, which explains the entrenchment of the phrase in the heart of the city. Interestingly enough, a synonymous phrase, in * centre of the city, in BNC is less frequent; it is used in 57 cases, whereas in * heart of the city occurred in 77 cases in BNC. Moreover, in * centre of the city exists alongside its variant in * city centre (788 cases in BNC), whereas the search for city heart in BNC did not bring any results.
Centres also serve as prototypes, or even stereotypes, of larger areas, towns, cities or even countries, whenever succinct information about one or another place is needed. Prototypes in this case are the best representatives characterising the whole category. Such interpretation helps explain other cases of the centrality sense, which include less defined contexts, such as in the heart of the forest/palms, in the heart of rural England/ countryside. What is foregrounded in such cases is a prototypical place, a strip of land, scenery rather than a clearly defined geographical centre. So the heart of the forest would be interpretable as a place which could serve as the best example of a forest because of the thickness of greenery, the atmosphere of natural surroundings with no intrusion of modern, man-made, civilisation, e.g.:
(12) (…) the Niaruna Indians who still pursue their ancestral way in the heart of the forest (…)
Utterances like the heart of rural England/countryside could be interpreted in a similar way: they are (stereo)typical places, or best representatives of the English countryside, usually further away from the bustle of the city. They are often marked as expressing the speaker’s positive emotions or attitude, i.e. phrases like in the heart of the forest or in the heart of rural England refer to nice places worth visiting or staying, evoking good memories.
Such extended interpretation of the centrality sense in terms of prototypicality has apparently given rise to expressions where the purpose is not only to describe or provide factual information, but also to give evaluation, express attitude, which, in some cases, becomes the primary purpose of the utterance. Heart is primarily associated with positive emotions and evaluation. In humorous and ironic discourse, the evaluation may be reversed. When investigating public discourse, for example, Musolff (2016, 44–45) found that a deeply entrenched slogan Britain at the heart of1 Europe in its default version stresses the importance of Britain in the decision making processes taking place in Europe. However, at some point in time it was also used “to mock the implicit optimism of its default version” (ibid., p. 45). Today, after Brexit, the ironic claim about the centrality of Britain sounds like prophecy.
In Lithuanian, the centrality sense is much less frequent accounting for only 5% of all cases in the sub-corpus. Of 25 cases, twenty refer to broader, less defined territories or territories of religious organisations, spiritual centres, and only five identify city, country or regional centres, e.g.:
(13) Dabar tur-i-me smag-ų menin-į objekt-ą pači-oje now have-PRS-1.PL cool-ACC.SG artistic-ACC.SG object-ACC.SG very-LOC.SG Vilniaus šird-yje.
Vilnius-GEN.SG heart-LOC.SG
‘Now we have such cool object of art in the very heart of Vilnius.’
(14) Nam-as stov-i pači-oje Dan Bosch-o šird-yje, house-NOM.SG stand-PRS.3 very-LOC.SG Dan Bosch-GEN.SG heart-LOC.SG palei Diez-ės vanden-is.
along Dieze-GEN.SG water-ACC.PL
‘The house stands in the very heart of Dan Bosch along the waters of the Dieze.’
Like in English, such expressions stress political, historical or any other relevance, or beauty, or any other outstanding feature of the place, which in 11 out of 25 cases in Lithuanian is emphasised by adding the word pačioje (‘most, very’), marking the highest degree of some quality. Therefore, typical examples of the construction in this sense would be pačioje miesto/Vilniaus/Europos širdyje (‘in the very heart of the city/Vilnius/ Europe’) and the like.
In descriptions of less clearly defined geographical locations, heart means ‘central’ and also ‘prototypically representing the area’, e.g.: pačioje Tibeto širdyje (‘in the very heart of Tibet’). The prototypicality and importance are also identifiable from contextual clues such as in the following:
(15) Zair-o džiungli-ųšird-yje, pači-oje afrikietiškiausi-oje Zaire-GEN.PL jungle-GEN.PL heart-LOC.SG very-LOC.SG African_most-LOC.SG Afrik-oje.
Africa-LOC.SG
‘in the heart of Zaire’s jungle, in the most African Africa.’
In the above example, the prototypicality of the location is emphasised by the phrase the most African Africa, which confirms my hypothesis about the centre often being interpreted also as typical or important.
The construction in the centrality sense is also used in contexts referring to an institution’s leader or governing body rather than just pointing directly at a physical centre, such as Islamo širdyje, bažnyčios širdyje (‘in the heart of Islam’, ‘in the heart of the church’). These expressions could be interpreted as metonymically metaphorical, because often the governing bodies reside in central, important, most representative places, hence the metonymy PLACE FOR INSTITUTION. The heart of the institution can metaphorically be interpreted as someone responsible, important, who also resides in the centre of a country or city.
In English and Lithuanian, what is found in the heart as a container in the centrality sense varies from very concrete objects like squares, streets, monuments, houses, lakes or marinas to people, phenomena and rather elusive substances like darkness to events. In case of English, the list mostly includes concrete objects, in Lithuanian they are more abstract; however, the scarcity of the Lithuanian data precludes any broader generalisations.
The third sense of the construction is concerned with hiding and concealing, and heart serves as a container for that purpose. The hiding is either explicitly mentioned or derived from contextual clues. Interestingly, in English, the sense is much less frequent (18.6%) than in Lithuanian, with about one third (31%) of all cases clearly pointing at a place where things are hidden or concealed from others for moral or other reasons: because it is impolite or immoral to openly speak about certain things, one is reluctant to reveal something unpleasant or intimate, for the sake of saving one’s face, etc.
One of contextual indicators of the sense is an explicit juxtaposition expressed through obvious, clearly seen, apparent or decidedly open phenomena as opposed to hidden or concealed. Sometimes what lies in the heart helps explain why people make one or another decision, lead their own way of life. For example:
(16) Although in his heart he knew that the war was unwinnable, he determined that he would put off the end for as long as possible.
Another characteristic contextual clue is concerned with the usage of the words depth or deep in English and gil-us (deep-ADj.NOM.SG), giliai(deep-ADV) in Lithuanian. English also often makes use of the idiom in the heart of hearts meaning ‘a very big secret, not to be discussed openly’, e.g.:
(17)In the heart of hearts we know that we will all die.
In the Lithuanian example below the idea of distrust is hidden deep in the woman’s heart, because she thinks that to distrust her own father is inappropriate and she would never tell other people about it; hence the usage of ‘deep’ in the following utterance:
(18) Takart gyvenim-e j-ai tek-o kau-ti-s vienai, that time life-LOC.SG she-DAT.SG happen-PST.3 fight-INF-REFL alone-DAT.SG nes gili-ai šird-yje tėv-u ji niekada because deep-ADV heart-LOC.SG father-INSTR.SG she-NOM.SG never ne-pa-si-tik-ejo.
NEG-PFV-REFL-trust-PST.3
‘At that time in her life she had to fight for herself, because deep in her heart she had never trusted her father.´
In English and Lithuanian, most utterances in the hiding sense are about knowing or knowledge, understanding, promises, memory or truth lying deep in one’s heart. Sometimes emotions are involved, but in those cases the aim of the utterance is not to describe them, but rather to express the idea of hiding them from the outside world; in some cases, from oneself, especially when one avoids admitting something unpleasant. In example (17), the idea of people’s mortality is rarely openly discussed among people, death is one of the topics which in Western culture is euphemistically referred to by other words or not mentioned altogether. In example (18) distrust hidden in the woman’s heart is a cause for her way of life, the truth she adheres to. Further, in example (19), the protagonist is sure of something he is reluctant to share with others; therefore, he hides it in his heart; in example (20), a person’s true identity is hidden in his heart:
(19) And already he knew in his heart that to be a vicar or a curate was not his vocation.
(20) Šird-yje j-is lik-o klajokl-is, nepratęs prie heart-LOC.SG he-NOM.SG remain-PST.3 wanderer-NOM.SG not_used to prabang-os.
luxury-GEN.SG
‘In his heart he remained a wanderer, not used to luxury.’
As seen in the above examples, true and genuine things are often hidden or concealed in one’s heart; therefore, in utterances realising this sense there are multiple references to true words and feelings, pure thoughts, genuine vocation; in religious texts people are asked to pray deep in their hearts, to speak or think deep in their hearts rather than openly.
One more pattern of usage where the hiding sense is realised is concerned with memories. Many of them are either not pleasant or too intimate and sensitive to be shared with others. Thus, reference is often made to long years of hiding (21) or memories that are cut in, entrenched deep in one’s heart and unlikely to change (22), e.g.:
(21) Todėl ilg-us met-us slėpi-au šird-yje tą therefore long-ACC.PL year-ACC.PL hide-PST.1.SG heart-LOC.SG that-ACC-SG prisiminim-ą. memory-ACC.SG
‘Therefore, for long years I have been hiding that memory in my heart.’
(22) Giliausi-ai šird-yje į-si-spaud-ę lik-o deepest-ADV heart-LOC.SG PFV-REFL-cut_in-PA.PST.3PL remain-PST.3 skaud-ūs prisiminim-ai
painful-NOM.PL memory-NOM.PL
‘Deepest in my heart painful memories remained cut in.’
In English, things that are hidden and not likely to be remembered at all are described through the image of burial taking place in one’s heart. What is buried is not limited to thoughts; people, ideas, plans can also be buried in one’s heart.
The sense of hiding, as already mentioned, mostly involves but is not confined to knowledge, understanding and reasoning. Emotions mentioned in the context of hiding brings the hiding sense close to the sense of containerised emotions and, apparently, is another proof that meaning in language is not always cut into distinct areas separated from one another by clear boundaries.
At first sight the sense of centrality and the sense of hiding seem to be opposite or at least hardly compatible in the construction under study. However, the study reveals that the connection is plausible as the senses are linked through the idea of importance.
The study of a single construction in two languages with the element of heart has demonstrated that in the absolute majority of cases the construction is used metaphorically, and the metaphor is based on the container image schema. In both languages the construction appears in three senses, or three types of containers: centre, container for emotions and a hiding place. The distribution of senses is rather language-specific. English gives preference to conceptualising heart as centre of an area or activity, which is much less relevant for Lithuanian, especially in geographical contexts, and Lithuanian more frequently employs the construction in a sense of heart as a container for emotions, with emotions varying from very positive to very negative, with a slight preference for a slight preference for negativity.
The third sense, that of a hiding place, indicates that in addition to emotions and feelings, heart may be a place for hiding your knowledge and understanding. Moreover, this is a place for true ideas and identities. Thus the claim of the head-heart dualism raised in many works is not unequivocal, especially when verified on concrete usage data.
Figurative language, as is well-known from literature and noted in reference of all the three senses, usually carries evaluative load. Contexts realising the sense of centrality are generally positive, emphasising some good aspects of the central location of a building or an event, also referring to a prototypical forest or a village in the countryside. In Lithuanian they seem more emphatic than in English. The construction in the container for emotions sense can hardly be can hardly be neutral. All contexts realising the sense are evaluative, depending on the emotion. The hiding sense is confined to contexts where ideas or truth are hidden in the best place which only the speaker knows; the evaluative load strongly depends on context. The emotion and the hiding senses are most frequent in fiction, whereas the centrality sense is mostly characteristic of newspapers or popular texts such as tourist guidebooks.
The three senses are not clearly delimited. The sense of centrality is sometimes closely linked to emotions, especially when speaking about the centrality of less physical areas such as institutions (e.g. church), movements or other groups of people with strongly expressed element of spirituality. The hiding sense in some cases also merges with the sense of a container for emotions, especially when emotions rather than knowledge or understanding are hidden. The continuum approach to the semantics of the construction helps understand the key principles of meaning making and serves as a key in creating texts where heart is used figuratively.
The results of this research might be useful to language students, because figurative senses are the ones that are very problematic to acquire and cannot be rendered by a verbatim translation from one’s native language. The productivity of the sense of centrality and less frequent sense of a container for emotions in English as well as a very productive sense of a container for emotions with centrality barely featuring at all in Lithuanian may be a key to understanding that there is no one to one correspondence between languages and cultures. It becomes paramount at more advanced stages of language learning when students struggle with intricate differences between synonymous ways of expression and strive at near-native idiomaticity.
The present investigation has been limited to a single construction and a small data corpus. The study has generally confirmed the relevance of the motivated polysemy approach adhered to in cognitively oriented linguistic research and the idea of a continuum, especially in semantics. However, more research could be done into similar prepositional constructions with the primary sense of proximity, such as at the heart, close to one’s heart in English and prie širdies ‘at (one’s) heart’, arti širdies ‘close to one’s heart’ in Lithuanian. It would be also interesting to see if the same senses are identifiable in similar constructions in other languages. Still another line of research is possible in studying cross-linguistic patterns attempting to identify, for example, if, despite similar conceptualisation in the construction under study, all hearts in English are rendered as hearts in Lithuanian or vice versa.
As a final note to this investigation, it seems to be worth noting that this paper only touched upon a very small patch of a large field of research of heart-related phraseology. Perhaps that is why the answer to the question posed in the title of the paper is not so easy. It is not a matter of choice between emotion and reason. Both emotion and reason may be found in one’s heart. And not only them.
