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Conceptualization of emotions in the novel The Slynxby Tatyana Tolstaya

  • Anna Głogowska

    Dr Anna Głogowska is an assistant professor at the Institute of Applied Linguistics, University of Warsaw. She conducts classes in written translation (on topics including economics and the use of CAT tools), practical Russian language teaching (developing and improving communicative competence) and classes of a glottodidactic profile (teaching language systems and skills at a general secondary school). Dr Anna Glogowska’s research interests include literary translation, didactics of translation, Russian colloquial language (prostoriechiye).

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    and Julia Ostanina-Olszewska

    Dr Julia Ostanina-Olszewska, Assistant professor at the Institute of Modern Languages, Pedagogical University of Krakow, PhD- 2006, University of Warsaw. Her research interests include language teaching/learning, cross-cultural communication, translation and corpus linguistics. Author of a monograph about the unified transcription in a multilanguage dictionary, coauthor of a Polish-English-Russian Businessman's Dictionary with transcription and co-author of Polish-Russian Russian-Polish Dictionary. She has published articles in Polish, American, Lithuanian and Belarussian journals in Russian, Polish and English. Her latest research on metaphor concerns the study of metaphors in education, translation and online communication.

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Published/Copyright: January 22, 2023

Abstract

The language of emotions is culturally conditioned and a conceptualization of emotions is determined by the value systems adopted in given cultures, as well as by personal experiences in recognizing, valuing, and communicating those emotions. It is believed that sometimes certain emotions have no lexical equivalents in particular languages. Even within one culture and one language, we can observe a gray area in the meaning of terms from this field. This is not surprising, given the subjective perception of the world by each member of a specific community, as well as the multitude of emotions themselves.

Although most information about other people’s emotions comes to the recipients through language, talking or writing about them is not simple. Emotions are among the concepts that are not very clearly delineated in our experience and therefore other, more comprehensible concepts, such as spatial orientations or objects, should be used when referring to them.

In the novel The Slynx by Tatyana Tolstaya, emotions are conceptualized and represented for instance by liquids, small animals, natural forces, and substances with some specific taste (sour, bitter, etc.). Our goal was to figure out which emotions and their linguistic instantiations are only typical for the Russian language and which ones would fall in the universal category. The paper will focus on the description and the way emotions are conceptualized from a cognitive linguistic perspective, drawing on CMT (Conceptual Metaphor Theory), conceptual metonymies, and cognitive models.


Institute of Applied Linguistics University of Warsaw Dobra 55 00-312 Warszawa, Poland

Uniwersytet Pedagogiczny im. Komisji Edukacji Narodowej w Krakowie Podchorążych 2 30-084 Kraków, Poland


About the authors

Dr Anna Głogowska

Dr Anna Głogowska is an assistant professor at the Institute of Applied Linguistics, University of Warsaw. She conducts classes in written translation (on topics including economics and the use of CAT tools), practical Russian language teaching (developing and improving communicative competence) and classes of a glottodidactic profile (teaching language systems and skills at a general secondary school). Dr Anna Glogowska’s research interests include literary translation, didactics of translation, Russian colloquial language (prostoriechiye).

Dr Julia Ostanina-Olszewska

Dr Julia Ostanina-Olszewska, Assistant professor at the Institute of Modern Languages, Pedagogical University of Krakow, PhD- 2006, University of Warsaw. Her research interests include language teaching/learning, cross-cultural communication, translation and corpus linguistics. Author of a monograph about the unified transcription in a multilanguage dictionary, coauthor of a Polish-English-Russian Businessman's Dictionary with transcription and co-author of Polish-Russian Russian-Polish Dictionary. She has published articles in Polish, American, Lithuanian and Belarussian journals in Russian, Polish and English. Her latest research on metaphor concerns the study of metaphors in education, translation and online communication.

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Published Online: 2023-01-22
Published in Print: 2022-12-16

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