Концептуализација емоција код кинеских студената који уче српски као страни језик / Conceptualization of Emotions Among Chinese Students Who Are Learning Serbian as a Foreign Language

Abstract

This paper examines conceptualization of the emotions of love, sadness, fear, and anger among Chinese students learning Serbian as a foreign language. The aim of the study is to determine how the participants conceptualize these emotions and to compare the findings with previous cognitive-linguistic research on the conceptualization of emotions. The theoretical framework is based on the principles of cognitive linguistics, primarily on George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s theory of conceptual metaphor; Zoltán Kövecses’s research on the conceptualization of emotions; the work of Ning Yu and Yue Haoping on conceptual metaphors of emotion in Chinese; as well as Rajna Dragićević’s research on the conceptualization of emotions and verbal associations in Serbian. The study was conducted by means of an associative test in the form of a sentence-completion task, on a sample of fifty students from Beijing Foreign Studies University. The analysis shows that love is most commonly conceptualized as closeness, security, and warmth, while sadness is associated with loss and loneliness. Fear is most frequently linked to uncertain and unfamiliar circumstances, whereas, in the case of anger, injustice and the thwarting of goals stand out as triggers, and loss of control as one of the ways in which it is represented. The findings are partially consistent with the results of previous cognitive-linguistic research on the conceptualization of emotions, but they also point to certain divergences from some conceptual models described in the literature. The study confirms that the associative test is a useful supplementary method for investigating the conceptualization of abstract concepts.