Conceptualization of Negative Emotions in Modern English and Russian Drama

Abstract

The present research focuses on the conceptualization of strong negative emotions experienced by the personages involved in conflicts, or quarrels, in contemporary British and Russian drama and approaches them from a cognitive linguistic perspective. The study attempts to reconstruct both potentially universal and culture-specific conceptual metaphors through the establishment of a set of correspondences or mappings between a ‘source’ and ‘taget’ domains. The materials yielded a number of culture-specific metaphors alongside with a number of potentially universal metaphors shared by the Anglo and Russian cultures, whose universality could be accounted for by the shared embodiment.