THE CONCEPTUAL CATEGORIES OF EMOTIONS RENDERED BY THE IMAGE OF “THE HEART” USED IN SOMATIC PHRASEOLOGICAL UNITS

Viorica LIFARI Moldova State University

Abstract

The phraseological units with a somatic lexeme comprise a big amount of linguistic evidence for studying the spiritual culture in different languages. In this paper we conducted a research of somatic phraseological units that contain the “heart” lexeme in the English, Romanian and Russian Languages. The examples under analysis have been collected from dictionaries and classified according to “the heart” image which denotes a certain conceptual category of emotions. The study was performed following the semantic criteria suggested by the American professor G. Lakoff, the Romanian researcher N. Anghelescu and also by the famous Polish linguist A. Wierzbicka. Having completed the research we identified similarities and differences both in the category of emotion concept and in the images of ‘the heart” that describe these concepts in the three languages of study. The results of the investigation are reflected in tables contained in the paper. Keywords: concept, emotion, “heart” image, metaphor, somatic phraseological units.