Abstract
This paper investigates the role of bodily, cognitive, social-cultural, and discourse-pragmatic factors in the formation of the cultural model of hayâ in Persian by broadening Kovecses’s (1990) account of emotion concepts. The analysis of the data collected from the Persian newspaper Keyhan indicates that hayâ together with a set of key concepts (effat ‘chastity’, aberu ‘face/public image’, and gheirat ‘moral vigilance’) form a key cluster and jointly regulate social interactions in Iranian culture. Hayâ is shown to be a figuratively constructed emotion concept. Conceptual metaphors are employed to measure the existence and sufficiency of the emotion, to represent the sanctity and vulnerability of hayâ, and to highlight the protective, segregative, and prohibitive functions of hayâ. This research shows that adding formal and socio-pragmatic properties of emotions to the cognitive analysis contributes to discovering characteristic features and cognitive functions of culturally significant emotions which might not be identified if emotions are merely seen as individual feeling states (Kovecses 1990) or social constructs (Lutz 1988).
