Abstract
The stories of love that start in antiquity are guided by an unconscious form of metaphorical reasoning, allowing us to make the effects of love understandable in particular verbal ways. So, another semiotic approach to the meaning of love is to consider the language used to characterize it and to examine how words, figurative expressions, poetry, etc. inform romantic practices and traditions. These are revelatory of the unconscious cultural imprints that people across the world have deemed as essential and meaningful in lovemaking. English-speaking societies use words such as sweet, attractive, passionate, fiery, enchanting, etc. to describe the perceived effects of love. Each one is a figure of speech that exposes specific perceptions that are imprinted in the words themselves. For instance, the love-is-a-sweet-taste metaphor not only underlies linguistic expressions such as “She’s my sweetheart,” but is also connected historically with symbols and rituals, such as the giving of sweets to a loved one on Valentine’s Day. These are not isolated random practices—they are organized cognitively through metaphorical reasoning. The chapter looks further into how the language of love is embedded in everyday discourse and in the classic stories and proverbs connected with love. These have constituted an implicit linguistic code that we use to this day for referring to love and romance.
When love is not madness, it is not love.
—Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–1681)
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Notes
- 1.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 3.
- 2.
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- 3.
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- 4.
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- 5.
Aristotle’s discussions of metaphor are found in his Rhetoric: The Works of Aristotle, W. D. Ross (ed.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952); and Poetics: The Works of Aristotle, W. D. Ross (ed.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952).
- 6.
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This is discussed in Marcel Danesi, The Origins of the Kiss, op. cit.
- 8.
Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, op. cit.
- 9.
Marcel Danesi, The Origins of the Kiss, op. cit.; Nicholas Perella, The Kiss Sacred and Profane; op. cit.
- 10.
Solomon Asch, “On the Use of Metaphor in the Description of Persons,” in H. Werner (ed.), On Expressive Language, pp. 86–94 (Worcester: Clark University Press, 1950).
- 11.
Roger W. Brown, Words and Things (New York: The Free Press 1958), p. 146.
- 12.
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- 14.
Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (Toronto: Academic Press, 1981).
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- 16.
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- 18.
See, for example, Marcel Danesi, “The Bidirectionality of Metaphor,” Poetics Today 38 (2017): 15–33.
- 19.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding (London: Collins, 1690); David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Clarendon, 1749).
- 20.
James Mill, Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (London: Longmans, 1829).
- 21.
James Edie, Speaking and Meaning: The Phenomenology of Language (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), p. 193.
- 22.
Giambattista Vico, The New Science, trans. Thomas H. Bergin and Max Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984).
- 23.
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- 24.
Meg Bogin, The Women Troubadours (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1980), p. 133.
- 25.
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- 26.
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- 27.
George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion (London: Penguin, 2013).
- 28.
Chrétien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances (Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 2008).
- 29.
Chrétien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances, p. 34.
- 30.
William Makepeace Thackeray, The History of Pendennis: His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy (Boston: Houghton, Miflin, 1850), p. 36.
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Danesi, M. (2019). The Language of Love. In: The Semiotics of Love. Semiotics and Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18111-6_3
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