Emotions travelling across cultures. Embodied grounding of English vis-à-vis Italian prepositional phrases

This article examines the ‘AdjEM+PP’ construction in the English-Italian language pair (e.g., angry at my audacity/arrabbiato per la mia audacia) with the aim of identifying the kinaesthetic embodied schemas that motivate the language of emotions. The analysis of corpus data highlights the interplay between culture and mind, and the cross-linguistic comparison offers some interesting observa- tions that appear to undermine some stereotypes about the way in which emo- tions are conceived of in the two cultures. Comparative semantics foregrounds the non-diagrammatic rendition in the translation of emotion language and allows for typological hypotheses about cultural cognition and the connection between Talmy’s dichotomy of manner-framed and path-framed languages.