The lecture will present how basic emotions are conceptualised and expressed in Serbian and German phraseology, focusing on FEAR, ANGER, SADNESS and JOY. Since basic emotions are partly grounded in shared human physiology, the two languages often rely on strikingly similar phraseological images. Serbian krv se nekome ledi u žilama and German jemandem gefriert das Blut in den Adern, for example, express fear through the same bodily experience and con¬ceptual pattern. In other cases, however, a comparable emotional experience is structured thru related but different images. Serbian and German share the scenario of the heart moving downwards, but conventionalise it differently. Drawing on cognitive linguistics, contrastive phraseology and corpus data, the talk will give examples of different degrees of semantic and conceptual correspondence and will distinguish between phraseological units based on the same embodied experience and image, units sharing a broader conceptual model but differing in their linguistic imagery, and language-specific conventionalisations without a direct conceptual counterpart. It will be demonstrated how these findings can be represented in a concept-based bilingual phraseological resource. Using FEAR as a case study, phraseological units will be organised through intermediate conceptual scenarios such as COLD/FREEZING, TREMBLING AND LOSS OF BODILY CONTROL, DOWNWARD MOVEMENT OF THE HEART, and HAIR STANDING UP. This model illustrates the central idea of EMOBRIDGE: moving beyond lists of translation equivalents towards a representation of how emotion concepts are structured, related and differently lexicalised in Serbian and German phraseology.

Svetlana Slijepčević Bjelivuk is a Senior Research Associate at the Department of Standard Language at the Institute for the Serbian Language of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SASA). Her research focuses on lexicology and lexicography, phraseology, cognitive linguistics, discourse analysis, corpus-assisted discourse analysis and digital language resources. She has worked on the Dictionary of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and in the development of digital lexicographic resources. Her current research examines Serbian–German phraseological equivalence and the conceptualisation of emotions in phraseology, with a particular focus on concept-based bilingual digital phraseography. She is the author of several monographs on crisis and political discourse, as well as several dictionaries, and has published widely on lexical innovation, conceptual analysis, public discourse and digital lexicography.