Modeling emotional concepts: Anguish, sadness, sorrow, grief

Despite the presence of a certain number of works on the emotional concepts of anguish, sadness, sorrow, and grief, they need further research since they are key concepts of culture that are nationally unique and culturally significant in the Russian language picture of the world. The constantly growing arsenal of methods of linguistic research allows taking a new look and filling in the gaps in the study of this problem. The aim of the article is an attempt to reconstruct the concepts of anguish, sadness, sorrow, and grief on the basis of lexicographic sources of various typologies and texts extracted from the main and poetic subcorpora of the Russian National Corpus. The research methods were: conceptual analysis in modeling concepts based on semantic groups of attributes; semantic analysis at the stage of identifying the main seme and determining groups of attributes; comparative analysis of semantic relations; method of quantitative characteristics of data from the National Corpus of Russian, English, German and French Languages. At the first stage, the main semes are identified; the upper points of the concept square are determined (the concept of the cause and the image of the condition); the classification of semantic groups of attributes (typical, symbolic, deep, intense and long) is presented; the content of the concept, as well as its volume, has been recreated by considering adjectival attributes and predicates on the material of the Dictionary of Epithets of the Russian Literary Language and the classical texts of the subcorpora of the Russian National Corpus. At the second stage, the semantic constants of the emotional concepts “anguish”, “sadness”, “sorrow”, “grief” are constructed as conditions, causes and purposes through the results of a network of semantic relations. At the third stage, using etymological research the conceptum is constructed (constant signs of concepts are identified): “anguish” - constraint of the spirit, excitement and anxiety; “sadness” -contrition, sorrow; “sorrow” - care, concern; “grief’ - misfortune, unhappiness. A conclusion is made about the dynamics of manifestation of mental suffering of a Russian person, the degree, depth and nature of emotions. The description of emotional concepts demonstrates the successive development of emotion: from a typical Russian experience of mild sadness and sorrow, turning into anguish, to universal grief, the cause of which is misfortune and unhappiness, which is noted in the distinctive features and in the history of the development of words. It seems that the results of the study will contribute to a significant expansion of the traditional idea of emotional concepts and make a certain contribution to the study of the Russian conceptosphere. Contribution of the authors: the authors contributed equally to this article. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.

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