Metaphors of Heartache in English and Vietnamese Pop Songs: A Cross-Cultural Perspective

Abstract

"Recognizing popular music as a powerful lens for collective emotion and metaphor as the cognitive mechanism for abstract feelings, this study investigates the cross-cultural conceptualization of heartbreak in contemporary English Pop (E-Pop) and Vietnamese Pop (V-Pop) ballads, focusing on universal and culture-specific patterns. The analysis of a corpus of 50 pop ballads (25 per language), which yielded 318 V-Pop and 263 E-Pop metaphorical linguistic expressions (MLEs), utilized the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT). The findings establish a two-tiered conceptual structure for heartache. At the universal level, metaphors of Conflict and Destruction and of Space and Motion are highly dominant in both corpora, demonstrating that emotional pain is fundamentally grounded in shared embodied experiences such as falling, breaking, or losing balance. At the cultural level, however, the metaphorical patterns diverge. E-Pop prioritizes the Resource and Economy model, framing heartbreak as a crisis of individual investment requiring defiant high agency. By contrast, V-Pop emphasizes the Fluid and Nature model, framing suffering as an uncontrollable force that necessitates quiet acceptance and low agency. This divergence is also seen in emotional embodiment: V-Pop externalizes distress as observable somatic decline and social status disruption, consistent with a collectivist orientation, whereas E-Pop represents it primarily as an internal psychological struggle. Collectively, this research empirically supports the hierarchical model of emotional conceptualization, where cultural worldviews (such as Western individualism and Vietnamese collectivism) shape how universal metaphorical patterns are selected and interpreted. The findings offer meaningful contributions to CMT and practical implications for cross-cultural communication and language teaching by illustrating how metaphor reflects each society’s characteristic ways of experiencing, expressing, and coping with emotional pain."