A construção do sentido de felicidade no livro A arte da felicidade do Dalai Lama e Howard C. Cutler à luz da linguística cognitiva

Abstract

This dissertation aims to examine the cognitive-discursive process involved in the construction of the meaning of “happiness” and investigate the moral dimension that permeates the different uses of this concept in Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler’s The Art of Happiness. We observed how the meaning of HAPPINESS emerges as the authors develop themes in each part of the book through the narratives produced about achieving happiness. To achieve success in our study objective, we adopted as central theoretical contributions the concepts of conceptual metaphor (Lakoff; Johnson, 1980), frame (Duque, 2015, 2017), and online/offline frames (Vereza, 2013a). These analytical categories are inserted in the theoretical-methodological framework of Embodied Cognitive Linguistics, which aligns with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological perspective addressing our immediate and embodied experience of the world. This research, qualitative and interpretative in nature, aims to understand how linguistic constructions shape systems of value. The following tools were employed for the methodological procedures to analyze the data: Procedure For Identifying Conceptual Metaphors – PICM (Vereza; Duque, in press), frame-based analysis methodology (Duque, 2015, 2017), and content analysis (Bardin, 1977). With the purpose of visualizing the frames evoked by the lexical items of the textual surface, we used text processing software to create cloud, similarity, and Correspondence Factor Analysis (CFA) graphs. The analysis of the results allows us to understand more accurately that “happiness” is built based on the conceptual frame of “goal”, which encompasses the elements of “origin-path-goal”. Furthermore, the methodology used has highlighted that the underlying morality associated with uses of the concept of HAPPINESS in discourse is represented by the metaphor: MORALITY IS STRENGTH.