Cognitive Linguistics. The Conceptualisation of Happiness

Abstract: In today’s society there is an obsession with finding happiness. According to the coca-cola company, all you need to do is open happiness1, but why stop with a can of coke when you can find your happiness on a dating site. It even seems to come in edible form in your local shop. But what exactly is happiness? De Saussure spoke of “the arbitrary nature of the sign” as a two part model; “the signified” and “the signifier”. The sign itself is a result of these two parts and can take form as words, sounds, images, smells and more (Saussure 1983:67). “The signified” represents the concept, almost like a mental picture, and “the signifier” represents the form, that is the actual word. Hence, to understand the full concept of happiness not only the words needs to be analyzed but also the mental picture associated with the word. Trough the methods of Cognitive Linguistics this paper will try to examine the concept of happiness by looking at the tree lexemes; happiness, blissful and joyful. It will try to determine if the three lexemes are used differently when speaking of happiness. In order to capture the full concept, the corpus analysis will contain both examples from a blog corpus and images from Google.