EMOTIONAL METAPHORS IN THE RUSSIAN AND CHINESE LANGUAGES AS INDICATORS OF DESTRUCTIVE EMOTIONS

Abstract

The article reveals how the metaphorical models of the Russian and Chinese languages encode destructive emotions and thereby set culturally normative ways of experiencing and expressing them. Emotion is interpreted not as an “inner fact” but as a socially meaningful experience that takes shape through stable images entrenched in lexis, phraseology, and contemporary discourse. On the basis of comparative material, it is shown that Russian metaphorics is predominantly built on scenarios of spontaneity and loss of control: anger is conceptualized as fire and “boiling” in a closed vessel followed by an “explosion,” fear as cooling and falling (loss of verticality), shame as scorching heat and the desire to disappear, which forms an image of a subject undergoing the impact of passion. The Chinese picture demonstrates a different ontologization of affect: anger is associated with the directed movement of qi and the “heat” of the liver, fear with the dispersal of the spirit and the vulnerability of the gallbladder, shame with damage to “face” as a reputational resource, shifting the experience into the plane of somatic regulation and the maintenance of social harmony. The identified divergences explain potential intercultural communicative breakdowns and make it possible to use metaphorical indicators as a tool for interpreting conflict behavior and self-regulation strategies in different linguacultures.