Metáforas do medo

Abstract

Fear is a primitive emotion, essential for the preservation of the human species. We fear nature and its destructive capacity, we fear the supernatural and what science does not explain, we fear the other and his motivation to do evil and we fear our own deteriorating human condition. But, even with all these fears, we remain interested in artistic works that cause us that same emotion. Fear literature is the genre that brings together literary works that aim to cause, as a reading effect, the emotion of fear. Therefore, it is assumed that these works present a language characteristic of the emotion treated. For this reason, it is suggested that fear literature is the source of data for research on conceptual metaphors of fear. Starting from conceptual metaphors already listed and discussed in Kövecses (1990, 2004, 2007), we proposed to analyze the conceptual metaphors of fear in Portuguese, found in three novels (translated into Portuguese) by Stephen King, the Master of Terror, from different eras in his 50 years of literary production: IT (1986), Desperation (1996) and Doctor Sleep (2013). As a methodology for data collection and interpretation, we chose the Systematic Metaphor Analysis (SCHMITT, 2017), which goes through seven phases: the identification of the target phenomenon, the collection of culturally based metaphors, the identification of metaphors and the synthesis of metaphorical models, the phase of interpretations, steps to guarantee reliability and, finally, the presentation of results. For the analysis of metaphors, the multilevel view of conceptual metaphor is used (KÖVECSES, 2017). The conceptual metaphor, previously a projection between source and target domains, comes to be seen as a schematic hierarchical structure of knowledge, ranging from the most schematic, least specific level (image schemas), to the least schematic, more specific (mental spaces), going through domains and frames. In the multilevel view, the meaning of the conceptual metaphor is built at the individual level, after activating the superordinate, basic and subordinate levels. The aim of the research is, therefore, to understand the emotion of fear in linguistic expressions, considering the schematic structure of knowledge that supports the conceptual metaphors found. In total, 62 occurrences of fear metaphors were analyzed, from the perspective of the multilevel view of conceptual metaphor, in eleven categories listed by Kövecses (2004, 2007). Compared to their counterparts in American English, the original language of the excerpts, the data point to the universality of conceptual metaphors of fear between the Portuguese and English languages