“How Are We Going to Erase this Shame?” A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Shame Metaphors in Russian and Jordanian Arabic Discourse
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33806/ijaes1133Keywords:
culture, emotion discourse, Jordanian Arabic, Russian, shame metaphorAbstract
The study examines the factors that shape the metaphoric conceptualization of shame in Russian and Jordanian Arabic (JA). The study adopts Conceptual Metaphor Theory as based on main meaning focus (Kövecses 2011) as its theoretical framework. Data were collected from two types of sources: social platform pages (VKontakte, Facebook) and informants’ responses (20 native speakers of Russian and JA). The data collected from both sources were manually analyzed using a qualitative approach and employing MIP and Steen’s five-step procedure (2007). We argue that a) shame in Russian and JA is conceptualized through common source domains (physical weight, stain/dirt, hidden place, physical damage or pain, pursuer/hunter, curse, and inheritable legacy) and culture-specific domains for Russian (fire, cold, black hole) and JA (blackening of face, throwing ʕga:l ‘traditional Arab headband’, physical size); b) the main meaning focus of Russian and JA metaphors of shame can arise from both predetermined similarities and contrastive contexts, which highlights the importance of cross-cultural research on this emotion.
References
Alazazmeh, Hadeel M. and Aseel Zibin. (2023).’ The conceptualization of anger through metaphors, metonymies and metaphtonymies in Jordanian Arabic and English: A contrastive study’. Cognitive Semantics, 8(3): 409–446.
Al-Jallad, Nader. (2010a). ‘The concept of “shame” in Arabic: Bilingual dictionaries and the challenge of defining culture-based emotions’. Language Design, 12: 13–57.
Al-Jallad, Nader. (2010b). ‘The semantic concept of “shame” in the Holy Qur’an’. In Monferrer-Sala, Juan Pedro and Urban, Ángel (eds.), Sacred Text: Explorations in Lexicography, 81–106. Berlin: Peter Lang Verlag.Bedford.
Bogdzevič, Monika. (2021). ‘Metaphorical conceptualization of anger, fear, and shame in Lithuanian: In search of cultural content’. Vilnius University Open Series, 2: 76–96.
Brown, Brené. (2007). I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn’t): Telling the Truth About Perfectionism, Inadequacy, and Power. New York: Gotham Books.
Brown, Brené. (2015). Rising Strong: How the Ability to Reset Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead. New York: Spiegel and Grau.
Danziger, Kurt. (1990). Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psychological Research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Díaz-Vera, Javier E. and Teodoro Manrique-Antón. (2015). ‘Better shamed before one than shamed before all’: Shaping shame in Old English and Old Norse texts’. In Javier E. Díaz-Vera (ed.), Metaphor and Metonymy Across Time and Cultures: Perspectives on the Sociohistorical Linguistics of Figurative Language, 225–264. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Díaz-Vera, Javier E. (2014). ‘From cognitive linguistics to historical sociolinguistics: The evolution of Old English expressions of shame and guilt’. Cognitive Linguistic Studies, 1(1): 55–83.
Díaz-Vera, Javier E. (2024). ‘Old English emotion is temperature: Cultural influences on a universal experience’. Russian Journal of Linguistics, 28(1): 33–54.
Dineen, Anne H. (1990). ‘Shame/embarrassment in English and Danish’. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 10: 217–229.
Gausel, Nicolay, Colin W. Leach, Vivian L. Vignoles and Rupert Brown. (2012). ‘Defend or repair? Explaining responses to in-group moral failure by disentangling feelings of shame, rejection, and inferiority’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102(5): 941–960.
Group, Pragglejaz. (2007). ‘MIP: A method for identifying metaphorically used words in discourse’. Metaphor and Symbol, 22(1): 1–39.
Hejdenberg, Jennie and Bernice Andrews. (2011). ‘The relationship between shame and different types of anger: A theory-based investigation’. Personality and Individual Differences, 50(8): 1278–1282.
Herzberg, Julia, Andreas Renner and Ingrid Schierle. (2021). The Russian Cold: Histories of Ice, Frost, and Snow. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Keltner, Dacher and Jonathan Haidt. (1999). ‘Social functions of emotions at four levels of analysis’. Cognition and Emotion, 13(2): 177–210.
King James Bible. (n.d.). Lamentations 2:10. Retrieved on October 16, 2025, from https://biblehub.com/lamentations/2-10.htm.
Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Maria and Ekaterina V. Rakhilina. (2006). ‘Some like it hot’: On the semantics of temperature adjectives in Russian and Swedish’. Language Typology and Universals, 59(3): 253–269.
Kövecses, Zoltán, Laura Ambrus, Dániel Hegedűs, Rina Imai and Anna Sobczak. (2019). ‘The lexical vs. corpus-based method in the study of metaphors’. In Marianna Bolognesi, Mario Brdar and Ksenija Š. Despot (eds.), Metaphor and Metonymy in the Digital Age: Theory and Methods for Building Repositories of Figurative Language, 149–173. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Kövecses, Zoltán, Réka Benczes, Anna Rommel and Viktória Szelid. (2024). ‘Universality versus variation in the conceptualization of anger: A question of methodology’. Russian Journal of Linguistics, 28(1): 55–79.
Kövecses, Zoltán. (2000). ‘The scope of metaphor’. In Barcelona, Antonio (ed.), Metaphor and Metonymy at the Crossroads, 79–92. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Kövecses, Zoltán. (2002/2010). Metaphor: A Practical Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kövecses, Zoltán. (2011). ‘Recent developments in metaphor theory: Are the new views rival ones?’ Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 9(1): 11–25.
Krawczak, Karolina. (2014). ‘Shame, embarrassment and guilt: Corpus evidence for the cross-cultural structure of social emotions’. Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics, 50(2): 319–340.
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Langacker, Ronald W. (1987). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar: Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Maalej, Zouheir A. and Aseel Zibin. (2025). ‘Metaphors they kill by: Dehumanization of Palestinians by Israeli officials and sympathizers.’ International Journal of Arabic-English Studies, 25(1): 201–222.
Olwen and Kwang-Kuo Hwang. (2003). ‘Guilt and shame in Chinese culture: A cross-cultural framework from the perspective of morality and identity’. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 33(2): 127–144.
Omonova, Shakhodat. (2023). ‘Cognitive-linguistic analysis of the concept of “shame” in English linguaculture’. Web of Scientist International Scientific Research Journal, 4(8): 71–76.
Pavlenko, Aneta. (2008). Emotions and Multilingualism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pietrzak, Bartosz. (2021). ‘Cultural conceptualizations of shame and dishonor in early poetic Arabic (EPA)’. The Polish Journal of the Arts and Culture. New Series, 14(2): 73–94.
Rehim, Mastur H., Khawlah M. AL-Tkhayneh, and Tamim A. Jabarah. (2023). ‘The causes of delayed marriage among young men: An analytical descriptive study of a sample of Al Ain University students’. Academic Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, 12: 212–227.
Röder, Katrin and Christine Vogt-William. (2019). ‘Shame and shamelessness in Anglophone literature and media’. European Journal of English Studies, 23(3): 239–248.
Semino, Elena and Zsófia Demjén. (2016). The Routledge Handbook of Metaphor and Language. London: Routledge.
Sharifian, Farzad (ed.). (2017). Advances in Cultural Linguistics. Singapore: Springer.
Steen, Gerard. (2007). ‘Finding metaphor in discourse: Pragglejaz and beyond’. Cultura, Lenguaje y Representación/Culture, Language and Representation, 5: 9–25.
Steward, Frank H. (1994). Honor. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Takano, Yoshiyuki and Paul T. P. Wong. (2021). ‘Deterritorialization of shame in Japan during the fourth industrial revolution (4IR)’. In Christian H. Mayer, Elisabeth Vanderheiden and Paul T. P. Wong (eds.), Shame 4.0. Investigating an Emotion in Digital Worlds and the Fourth Industrial Revolution, 147–158. Cham: Springer.
Tangney, June Price and Rowland L. Dearing. (2002). Shame and Guilt. New York: Guilford Press.
Wikan, Unni. (1984). ‘Shame and honour: A contestable pair’. Man, 19: 635–652.
Zibin, Aseel, Abdel Rahman M. Altakhaineh and Hady J. Hamdan. (2022). ‘Love and beloved metaphors in Jordanian Arabic and English songs: A cognitive linguistic study’. Metaphor and the Social World, 12(2): 318–339.
Zibin, Aseel, Abdel Rahman M. Altakhaineh and Ola Musmar. (2024). ‘Head metonymies and metaphors in Jordanian and Tunisian Arabic: An extended conceptual metaphor theory perspective’. Language and Cognition, 16(4):
Zibin, Aseel and Khawlah M. Al-Tkhayneh. (2019). ‘A sociolinguistic analysis of the use of English loanwords inflected with Arabic morphemes as slang in Amman, Jordan’. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, (260): 155–175.
–2031.
Zibin, Aseel, Nabeeha Binhaidara, Hala Al-Shahwan and Haneen Yousef. (2025). ‘Metaphor interpretation in Jordanian Arabic, Emirati Arabic and Classical Arabic: artificial intelligence vs. Humans’. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 12(1): 1–12.
Zibin, Aseel and Olga Solopova. (2024). ‘Metaphors across languages, cultures and discourses: A research agenda’. Russian Journal of Linguistics, 28(1): 7–32.
