Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk

Understanding how emotions are clustered and labelled across languages offers fascinating insights into cultural differences and universals. This book delves into this very topic, analysing similarities and contrasts between Polish and English grouping and categorising emotions. The book combines a corpus-based linguistic analysis of emotion terms with empirical studies using both questionnaire-based data and online sorting tasks. It identifies several distinct clusters in both languages, such as "sadness/ grief" and "joy/ happiness/love," but also highlights divergences. For instance, the Polish concept of zal (often translated as regret or sorrow, but with unique connotations of grievance and longing) forms a cluster without a direct English equivalent, suggesting a distinct emotional nuance in Polish culture. The book builds upon existing psychological theories of emotion, particularly those emphasising the role of language in shaping emotional experience (constructionist theories). It also engages with cross-cultural psychology research on emotion recognition and expression, providing a linguistic lens to complement existing behavioural studies. By meticulously comparing the semantic fields of emotion words, the book enriches our understanding of how language both reflects and influences our emotional worlds, offering valuable contributions to psycholinguistics, cultural psychology, cognitive and corpus linguistics as well as to translation studies.

Nominated for the Best contribution to Slavic Linguistics/AATSEEL book award 2011 The concept of complex emotions is obviously polysemous. On the one hand, we can interpret it as a non-basic, non-prototypical, or culture-specific notion, on the other - and this is the interpretation we propose in this work - a complex emotion concept can be looked upon as a concept whose complexity emerges in interaction, due to the complex nature of its object. Our interpretation is thus construction-based, one in which meaning is not to be found exclusively in the lexical semantics of the term, but also in the, clearly meaning-laden, grammatical construction, e.g. a complement clause, expressing the object or cause of the emotion. The construal of a scene mapped on the form of a complex sentence involves the emotion that is unambiguously complex and not necessarily universal or prototypical. We argue throughout this book that cross-linguistic grammatical mismatches are a visible sign of conceptual and categorizational distinctions between the conceptualization of emotion in different languages and cultures. They also signal differences in what individual speakers consider salient in a portrayed scene. We offer a contrastive corpus-based study of Polish and English emotion concepts and the linguistic patterns they enter. Our theoretical approach combines lexical semantics and cognitive linguistics and proposes a cognitive corpus linguistics methodology. It is a cognitive linguistic endeavor in which we analyze grammatical category mismatches and provide detailed semantic analyses of different complement choices of emotion predicates. We also discuss insights into Polish and English cultural values gleaned from the different underlying categorizations of emotions. Combining theoretical analyses with pedagogical theory and classroom applications, this work breaks new ground and will reach audiences of linguists, teachers and students of Polish, teachers and students of English, translators, and other language researchers and practitioners.