Kövecses, Z. (1988). The language of love: The semantics of passion in conversational English. Lewisburg, PA:Bucknell University Press.

Romantic love is not reducible to a labeled set of reactions, according to the central thesis of this study. Instead, romantic love should be viewed as an incredibly complex conceptual network accompanied by specific physiological and behavioral reactions. The idea of love is shown to have a great deal of structure in addition to its complexity.

Furthermore, it appears that our conceptual networks of love are partially influenced by the physiological changes and behavioral manifestations, and because these networks are themselves partially influenced by the physiological changes and behavioral manifestations, they will influence how we feel and act when we are in love.

The study of commonly used expressions of love reveals the following elements in the conceptual metonymies: body heat and physical closeness that reveal the physiological changes and behavioral reactions associated with love; a system of conceptual metaphors: unity, fire, war, and insanity that provide the majority of the ontology of love; a system of emotion concepts related to love: affection, desire, friendship, and enthusiasm that define various relations.

Kövecses, Z. (1990). Emotion concepts. New York, NY: Springer-Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-3312-1

The primary goal of the research presented in this book is to answer the question: How do people understand their emotions?

A large number of scholars have attempted to answer this question. They have become interested in the nature of emotion concepts and emotional meaning as a result of their interest in how people understand their emotions.

Because the concept of understanding involves or presupposes the concepts of concept and meaning, it was only natural for scholars interested in how people understand their emotions to pay attention to emotion concepts and the meaning associated with emotion terms. As a result, the broader issue has frequently become more specific.

In his book The Language of Emotion, for example, Davitz posed the central question as follows: “What does a person mean when he says someone is happy, angry, or sad?” (Davitz, 1969).

Kövecses, Z. (2003). Metaphor and emotion: Language, culture, and body in human feeling. Cambridge University Press.

To what extent do biological, psychological, or cultural factors play a role in the formation of human emotions? Numerous researchers maintain that feelings are either products of human biology (also known as “biological reductionism”) or are the result of cultural influences (ie, social constructionism).

This book challenges the simplistic division that is commonly made between the body and culture by demonstrating how human emotions are “constructed” to a large extent through the experiences that individuals have while embodied in a variety of cultural contexts.