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Email this article Varieties in Meaning Construction. The Case of "fear" and "sadness" as Seen by University Students
Abstract
This article examines how university students construct the meanings of fear and sadness through metaphor and how these meanings vary across cohorts and genders within a usage-based model of meaning. The analysis combines ranked metaphor statements produced by fifth-year university students with percentage distributions of fear- and sadness-domain labels. Near-neighbour labels (terror, apprehension; grief, pensiveness) are treated as alternative categorizations within broader emotional domains. The results show that fifth-year students tend to conceptualize fear as an acting, burdensome, and persistent entity, while sadness is construed both as a pathological condition and as a perspectival state. The analysis is framed by Kövecses’s proposal that metaphor operates across multiple levels of schematicity and is constitutively shaped by context.
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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17951/lsmll.2026.50.3.119-131
Date of publication: 2026-10-30 11:37:59
Date of submission: 2025-12-22 19:53:46
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