Conceptual Metaphors of Happiness and Their Source Domains in English and Lithuanian: A Corpus-Based Contrastive Study

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to analyse how the concept of happiness is expressed in the English and Lithuanian languages. In order to carry out the research, 1000 concordance lines were analysed from the British National Corpus and 1000 concordance lines were examined from the Corpus of the Contemporary Lithuanian Language. 575 metaphorical expressions of happiness were found in the English corpora, and 454 metaphorical expressions of happiness were found in the Lithuanian corpora. 14 source domains in conceptual metaphors of happiness coincided in both languages. The conceptual metaphor HAPPINESS IS AN OBJECT in both languages has the biggest number of metaphorical expressions with the identical percentage of tokens in English and Lithuanian (43%). The second according to frequency of realisation conceptual metaphor in both languages HAPPINESS IS A LIVING BEING is also found with the same frequency in English and Lithuanian (10%). Happiness is also conceptualized as time, luck, light, substance, emotion, religion, journey, natural phenomenon, sense, goods, reward, and mathematics in both English and Lithuanian. Only 2 conceptual metaphors were not identified in the English language that were found in the Lithuanian language in which source domains are SETTING and BELIEF.