When the Devil Roasts Snakes on Your Heart: Religious Morality and the Cultural Conceptualization of Anger across Languages
Ruhr-Uni Bochum, campus, GB 5/151
Guest lecture by Veronika Jávor-Szelid, Assistant Professor at the Department of American Studies at the Eötvös Loránd University Budapest
ANGER is a core human emotion that plays an important role in social interaction and moral evaluation. Research in Cognitive Linguistics has shown that emotions are conceptualized through systematic patterns of metaphor and metonymy grounded in bodily experience and culturally shared knowledge. Integrating perspectives from Cognitive Linguistics and Cultural Linguistics, the study examines the moral and religious dimensions of ANGER across languages. The analysis draws on a large-scale comparative study of metaphors and metonymies of ANGER in 25 languages from 11 language families (Kövecses, Benczes, and Szelid, 2025), combining lexical and corpus-based data. The results show that religious and moral interpretations of ANGER vary considerably across cultures.
In some traditions, ANGER is conceptualized as an evil force, sin, or demonic possession, whereas in others such framings are absent or marginal. Alongside these negative evaluations, some traditions construe ANGER as divine or morally sanctioned wrath, associated with justice and moral authority, highlighting the role of culturally available conceptual resources in shaping emotional meaning.
