Lexico-semantic analysis of the emotion “grief and suffering”: Crosscultural overlapping of linguistic worldviews (on the material of Russian and English languages)

Abstract

The article analyses lyrics of folk songs that carry the most typical national characteristics and reflect socio-cultural relationships and principles of their expression in language. The authors present the findings of the dominant and comparative analysis of the semantics of lexical units in the source material. The study emphasizes the fact that the group of verbs that denote “grief and suffering” is the dominant one in Russian and English folklore. It is shown that more than one interpretation of lexemes in different languages is possible during the analysis of a folklore text. The authors claim that the emotion “grief and suffering” plays an important role in both Russian and English folklore. The novelty of the research stems from the fact that the specific features of the category of emotiveness are studied on the material of folk songs in two languages, so that it is possible to establish differences both in the expression and the description of emotions of the representatives of two different nations, which in turn points at a certain specificity of their mentality. The relevance of the study is determined by the need to identify ways of how emotions are expressed in English and Russian linguistic worldviews, since emotions are an integral component of spiritual culture and reveal a subjective interpretation of the reality by means of different languages, thus being an interesting linguistic issue.