The conceptualisation of anger in English and Polish: A comparative study

Mikolajczuk, Agnieszka (2000) The conceptualisation of anger in English and Polish: A comparative study. MPhil(R) thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

In the light of contemporary changes which may lead to the unification of several societies in the world, the question about the specificity of various nations' ways of thinking and feeling appears to be highly opportune now. The category of emotions, particularly of anger, which is treated as the basic and universal feeling by some and also as the only specific, Anglo-American emotion by others, has been chosen for this research to be investigated from a linguistic point of view. Two worlds: Slavonic in Polish and Germanic in English, are contrasted in this study. Such sources of information as dictionary descriptions, previous publications by other linguists (e.g. Wierzbicka, Kovecses, Lakoff, Diller) and the most important authentic modern English and Polish texts, which include the names of anger, have been under investigation here. Examination of these sources, mostly detailed in the textual analysis, allows the researcher to indicate one concept, 'anger', in English and two concepts, 'gniew' and 'zlosc', in Polish as the most central in the category under investigation. Semantic analysis of the texts, in which the lexemes dealing with these concepts (and one more peripheral concept, 'wrath') occur, leads to construction of their open explications. Such aspects of an emotional situation as an experiencer of the emotion, its causer, reason, object, evaluation, duration, manifestation and emotional surroundings are characterised here. These characteristics form the basis for a summarising comparison. It shows, firstly, that drawing distinct and sharp semantic boundaries between 'anger' and 'wrath' in English and 'gniew' and 'ziosc' in Polish is extremely difficult, as they overlap with each other in various aspects, and secondly, that full equivalents of the concepts examined do not exist in both languages. However, typical features of particular concepts or, more precisely, of their certain aspects in English and Polish, should be treated as specific marks of the situation typical of each concept being fixed in each language. These marks are recommended to be known to translators, lexicographers and foreign language teachers as being helpful in their "intercultural" work. Moreover, the historical and stylistical changes in the structure of the category examined lead the investigator to an open question about historical and cultural basis of these changes and of the future of the concepts analysed in this study. But this is a question to be answered in detail in another work of interdisciplinary research.

• Item Type: Thesis (MPhil(R))
• Qualification Level: Masters
• Keywords: Linguistics, sociolinguistics.
• Colleges/Schools: College of Arts & Humanities
• Supervisor's Name: Supervisor, not known
• Date of Award: 2000
• Depositing User: Enlighten Team
• Unique ID: glathesis:2000-73405
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 14 Jun 2019 08:56
• Last Modified: 09 Sep 2021 14:59
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/73405