A contrastive analysis of sweat/pot and tears/łzy in English and Polish from a cognitive-semantic perspective

Abstract

This study compares the English words tears and sweat with their Polish counterparts łzy and pot from a cognitive-semantic perspective. Beyond their prototypical meanings as bodily fluids associated with the eyes and skin – especially of the face – these words develop overlapping figurative senses. The analysis identifies both shared and language-specific conceptual metaphors and metonymies underlying their semantics, as well as patterns of metaphor-metonymy interaction. The study draws on data from the COCA corpus for English and the NKJP corpus for Polish. The findings show that while similar cognitive mechanisms motivate the figurativeness of the examined concepts in both languages, they result in distinct semantic extensions and complex metaphtonymic structures.