Emotions are often considered to be feelings alone, and as such they are viewed as being devoid of conceptual content. As a result, the study of emotions is usually not taken seriously by students of semantics and conceptual structure. A topic such as The Logic of Emotions would seem on this view to be a contradiction in terms, since emotions, being devoid of conceptual content, would give rise to no inferences at all, or at least none of any interest. We would like to argue that the opposite is true, that emotions have an extremely complex conceptual structure, which gives rise to wide variety of nontrivial inferences.

The conceptualization of anger

At first glance, the conventional expressions used to talk about anger seem so diverse that finding any coherent system would seem impossible. For example, if we look up anger in, say, Roget's University Thesaurus, we find about three hundred entries, most of which have something or other to do with anger, but the thesaurus does not tell us exactly what. Many of these are idioms, and they too seem too diverse to reflect any coherent cognitive model. Here are some example sentences using such idioms: