This paper investigates the cognitive metaphors linking up with the lexeme LOVE in Late Middle (1418-1500), Early Modern (1500-1710) and Present-Day (1960-) English corpus data. The main question is how the metaphors relate to the primary conceptual domains of space, time and sensory perception (Langacker 1987: 147-150, 1999: 171). A second question is whether the metaphors reflect any changes in people's world view. If "the most fundamental values in a culture [are] coherent with the metaphorical structure of the most fundamental concepts in the culture" (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 22), the concept of love appears to be a central issue for metaphor research. The concept of romantic love has indeed been studied in detail by Kövecses (1986, 1988, 1990). This paper belongs to a series concentrating on the meaning of the lexeme LOVE (Tissari 1999, 2000, forthcoming). They suggest that if one compares the sense 'romantic and sexual love' (eros) with 'family love' (storge), 'friendship love' (philia), 'religious love' (agape) and 'love of things' (khreia), 'eros love' indeed tends to be the most frequent category in comparisons across different text types or genres. Nevertheless, several kinds of love exist. The advantage of collecting all the metaphors linking up with the lexeme LOVE in various corpora is that one finds cognitive metaphors for all kinds of love. Consequently, one approaches a more general characterisation of the concept of love. Furthermore, the computerised search complements introspection by being impartial to what we might expect to find. While it does not show what is happening in the human brain, it still indicates what is happening in written language over a lengthy period. The corpora consulted are the Early Modern English period of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts (551, 000 words) and The Corpus of Early English Correspondence Sampler (450,000 words) on the one hand; and two one-million-word corpora, The Freiburg-Brown Corpus and The Freiburg-LOB Corpus, on the other. Although the lexeme LOVE and its derivatives are quite frequent in these data (N 7.7/10,000), their number is of course limited. But this does not prevent us from discussing the results. The definition of metaphor is simple in order to keep the focus on the basic cognitive domains. Therefore, every instance of the source domains space, time, and sensory domains, describing the target domain LOVE, was included in the study as a metaphor token, without recourse to a separate definition of metonymy, or of metaphorical blending. Such an approach underlines the importance of the domain of space, which yields the three major subgroupings of "containment", "amount" and "exchange". It appears that the cognitive metaphors linking up with the English lexeme LOVE have changed very little since the 15th century. As Kövecses (1990) suggests, the metaphor EMOTIONS ARE (FLUIDS IN) CONTAINERS is very central. At least as central to the lexeme LOVE is LOVE IS (A VALUABLE COMMODITY IN) AN ECONOMIC EXCHANGE. The question remains, whether all abstract concepts are primarily understood in terms of space as love seems to be, or whether it is the present theoretical and methodological framework which favours spatial conceptualisation. The theory does favour cultural similarities instead of cultural differences, because it seeks general principles that govern all aspects of human language (Lakoff 1990: 90-91).

REFERENCES

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Kövecses, Zoltán. 1988. The Language of Love: The Semantics of Passion in Conversational English. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press / London and Toronto: Associated University Presses.

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Tissari, Heli. 1999. "LOVE Shakes the Spheres: Five Prototypical Meanings in Shakespeare's Plays." Proceedings from the 7th Nordic Conference on English Studies, eds. Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen and Brita Wĺrvik. Turku: University of Turku.

Tissari, Heli. 2000. "Five Hundred Years of LOVE: A Prototype-Semantic Analysis." Lexicology, Semantics and Lexicography in English Historical Linguistics: Papers from the Fourth G.L. Brook Symposium, eds. Julie Coleman and Christian Kay. (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 194.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. 127-156.

Tissari, Heli. forthcoming. "AFFECTION, FRIENDSHIP, PASSION and CHARITY: A history of four 'love lexemes' since the fifteenth century." Neuphilologische Mitteilungen.