Grief and Sadness in Polish and English: Cultural Cognitive Linguistic Profiles

This chapter investigates the cultural cognitive linguistic profiles of the concepts of grief in English and its possible equivalents żal “regret,” smutek “sadness,” cierpienie “suffering,” and żałoba “mourning, bereavement” in Polish in the megaconceptual emotion clusters of sadness in English and smutek in Polish. The methodology applied is multidisciplinary and involves the GRID instrument and the online emotions sorting task as well as large corpus-based analyses with some discourse analytic findings and their culture-specific interpretation. The data will provide information on the construal characteristics of these concepts and their cultural linguistic underpinnings which characterize their profiles and contextual properties of use in the respective languages.