CULTURAL SYMBOLISM AND LINGUOCOGNITIVE REPRESENTATION OF EMOTIONS IN 20TH-CENTURY ENGLISH NOVELS: IMPLICATIONS FOR CROSS-CULTURAL COMMUNICATION
Keywords:
linguocognitive analysis; emotion; cultural symbolism; conceptual metaphor; 20th-century English fiction; intercultural communication; intercultural reader; pedagogy.Abstract
This article examines how emotions are linguocognitively represented in selected 20th-century English novels and how those representations instantiate cultural signs and symbols influencing cross-cultural interpretation. Combining close reading with corpus-assisted metaphor and symbol analysis, the study analyses passages from Virginia Woolf (Mrs Dalloway) , Ernest Hemingway (A Farewell to Arms / The Sun Also Rises) , and George Orwell (selected scenes), relating linguistic metaphor, embodied imagery, and semiotic motifs (weather, food/tea, bodily heat/cold, journeys) to Anglo cultural models of feeling (restraint, stoicism, irony). Findings show recurrent metaphorical mappings (e.g., emotion→temperature; emotion→journey; emotion→possession) and culturally charged symbols that shape both textual affect and likely cross-cultural misreadings. Pedagogical implications for intercultural communication and ELT are proposed: teaching metaphor-mapping and symbol decoding ; fostering the “intercultural reader” through comparative symbolism tasks; assessment instruments that measure interpretive flexibility. The article argues that integrating linguocognitive description with cultural semiotics enriches both literary interpretation and intercultural pedagogy.
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