Emotional State GEMÜTLICHKEIT in Cross-cultural Perspective: Corpus-based Approach

Abstract

The article is devoted to the cross-cultural study of the concept GEMÜTLICHKEIT representing ethnospecific emotional state relevant for the German-speaking community. To achieve the aim the language specific of the name of this concept – lexeme Gemütlichkeit – was revealed with the help of etymological, definitional, and contextual analysis, as well as the search for the interlingual equivalents, the usage of cross-cultural data and the data of representational language corpus. It has been proved that the concept GEMÜTLICHKEIT together with the concepts SICHERHEIT, ZUVERLÄSSIGKEIT and GEBORGENHEIT forms a unique “safety-cosiness quartet” of the German-speaking communities value system, i.e., the fragment of the world picture which together with the concept ORDNUNG is opposed to the existential fear – ANGST. A semantic profile of the word query Gemütlichkeit was built on the basis of the language corpus data. The profile “peaks” are the key features of the concept GEMÜTLICHKEIT. These features form the basis of the relevant definition of the lexeme Gemütlichkeit. The development of the definition was aimed not only at closing the gap in reference literature that needs a clear and complete definition of the concept GEMÜTLICHKEIT, but also at forming an adequate idea of this emotional state in the minds of the representatives of non-Germanspeaking communities.