In this talk, I raise a vitally important theoretical issue concerning conceptual metaphors and cognitive linguistics in general: Can conceptual metaphors be universal? To answer this question, I rely on a large-scale study my colleagues and I conducted on metaphors (and metonymies) of anger in twenty-five languages, encompassing eleven language families (Kövecses, Benczes, and Szelid, eds., 2025). Overall, we have identified about 400 conceptual metaphors in the twenty-five languages we investigated. Our results indicate that there are no conceptual metaphors that promise to have universal status in an absolute sense. What we found was that human beings around the world make use of the creative potential they are endowed with and create their metaphors systematically in congruence with the totality of their experiences. It is in this sense that I contend that universal metaphors for anger (or for whatever abstract concept) are theoretically possible, but highly unlikely.

References:

Kövecses, Zoltán, Réka Benczes, and Veronika Szelid, eds., 2025. Metaphors of anger across languages. Universality and variation. Berlin: De Gruyter.