Phraseology and Culture in English

hot and heat respectively. Temperature is not only a basic cognitive domain 
(cf. above), but it is also a very basic human experience. Humans acquire 
the concept of temperature from everyday bodily experience from early
on – we learn early that hot things burn and that very cold temperatures 
harm us as well. As regards the concept of heat, it should be added that in 
addition to its motivation by bodily experience it is also structured by 
metaphor: “Heat is a metaphorical construct; ... 
HEAT IS A FLUID 
with the 
flow properties analogous to water.” (Brown 2003). This metaphor both 
structures the folk model English speakers have of heat and it serves as an 
explanatory model in physics.
12
As is evident from expressions such as a
pressing engagement (pressure scale), or (he’s got) a quick temper (speed 
scale), English also exploits other scales as SDs in metaphoric mappings 
when intensity is at stake, but with the search word hot in mind, they are 
presently no concern of mine. 
The TDs of specific kinds of intensity are variable, thus we have those 
of emotion, sensation (perception, taste), close match, event structure and 
danger, giving us the following mappings: 
1.
INTENSE EMOTION IS HEAT
2.
INTENSE SENSATION IS HEAT
3.
CLOSE MATCH IS HEAT
4.
FINAL STAGE OF EVENT IS HEAT
5.
DANGER IS HEAT

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Doris Schönefeld 
The evaluation of the TDs involved in these mappings is not invariably 
positive, as we could expect from the primary metaphor 
GOOD IS UP 
and
from a potential, more general understanding of 
UP
as positive, but it may 
also be negative (as in mappings (1), (2), and (5)).
13
This matches well with 
the possible sensation of high temperature as more or less comfortable (cf. 
Section 2.1). What holds all these mappings together is the common SD, a 
folk or cultural model of heat. The TD of intense emotions (1) is structured 
by cultural models of emotions. The mapping of heat onto intense emotions 
is naturally supported by the metonymic link between these emotions and 
their physiological effects such as the production of adrenalin causing in-
creased heart rate, increased blood pressure, increased body temperature, 
excitement or agitation, redness of the skin (especially in the face) (cf. Fau-
connier & Turner 1999: 80f, who explain the concept of anger as a blend of 
three input spaces, the SD “physical event”, and a TD which consists of the 
two metonymically related spaces of “emotion” and “physiology”). As 
Gibbs (1994: 203) puts it: “The domains organized by such metaphoric re-
lations comprise “experiential gestalts” that are the products of our bodily 
experiences in interaction with the physical environment and other people. 
Some of these experiences may be universal, others may vary across cul-
tures.”
Mapping (2) has a synesthaetic flavour: intense taste or visual percep-
tion is conceptualized as the touch of something hot. 
Mapping (3) correlates heat, the upper end of the temperature scale, with 
the concepts of success and ideal, also drawing on the primary metaphor 
GOOD IS UP
.
Mapping (4) maps heat on accomplishments, i.e. activities which have a 
goal or an endpoint. Both these TD concepts can be conceived of as scalar 
and aspectual respectively, and in both cases, heat profiles the upper or 
final parts: the higher the quality, the hotter it is, the closer one is to the 
accomplishment of an activity, the hotter it is. 
The last mapping (5) can be understood to have arisen from a particular 
human experience of heat, namely fire: the heat of the fire can be danger-
ous, even deadly to human beings. 
A large number of the expressions extrapolated from the corpus can
be grouped into these 5 metaphorical mappings, and I think it plausible
to assume for the polysemy of hot its literal sense and just these five ex-
tended senses, which are held together by the more general mapping given 
above:

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Hot, heiß, and gorjachij
149
hot 1. having a high temperature / causing the sensation of a high temperature 
2. having / feeling / causing an intense emotion
a) 
excitement summer; 
b) 
lust 
pants, flesh;
c) 
commitment / involvement debate, dispute; 
d) 
passion 
tear, kiss, love, flush; 
e) 
excitement / topicality 
news, gossip
[f) 
impatience 
no 
examples] 
[g) anger 
no examples [but existing]] 
3. having / feeling / causing an intense sensation 
a) 
taste 
pepper
b) 
perception colour 
4. being close to match 
a) 
success 
favourite, tip
b) 
ideal stuff 
5. being close to final stage of event 
a) goal 
pursuit
6. dangerous
spot, potato, issues 
As the examples show, the nouns co-occurring with hot tell the language 
user more than just what the domains are (the bases) with regard to which 
the expressions have to be interpreted or understood. They also give clues 
as to which kinds of emotions / sensations etc. are being talked about (as in 
hot debate or hot colour), and the way in which the conceptual whole (the 
adjective and the noun as a more complex profile) can be related to a more 
complex base: the base of hot summer is the domain of time when the in-
tense emotion is experienced, the base of hot pants, hot flesh is the phe-
nomenon causing the intense emotion, the base of hot dispute is the act in 
which the intense emotion is experienced etc. 
For all the expressions in the corpus which have not (yet) reached the 
status of being highly entrenched or lexicalized, I assume that their mean-
ings are not retrieved from the mental lexicon as fixed wholes, but are 
computed on-line in a process of conceptual integration, also known as 
blending. This leaves room for understanding aspects of meaning of the 
combination which are not associated with one of the constitutive parts: hot
and news would contribute the ideas of “intense excitement” and “new 
piece of information”, the whole phrase would in addition have “sensa-
tional”.
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Doris Schönefeld