Lexical Explication of Anger and Rage in the Mongolian Languages

The article explores emotives that denote anger, rage, and irritation in the Mongolian languages. The aim of the article is to identify possible motivations for nomination in anger-related emotives. The relevance of the work is determined by the importance of issues related to how an individual linguistic personality perceives and conceptualizes the verbalization of perceptual and emotional experience. The material for this study was drawn from bilingual and explanatory dictionaries of Mongolian languages, as well as the author’s own field data. The descriptive method was used, along with continuous sampling, systematic classification of selected linguistic units, and contextual analysis. The emotive lexicon within this semantic field in the Mongolian languages reflects metaphors traditionally associated with this domain: anger is steam, anger is liquid, anger is fire, and rage is a dangerous beast. In the Mongolian languages, anger is lik-ened to poison or heartburn, boiling, bubbling, blazing, and bursting outward. Research of this kind helps refine linguistic and psychological understanding of the relationship between perception and cognition, and deepens the appreciation of the interpretive system through which sensory information – transmitted via various bodily sensations – is conceptualized.