Cross-linguistic Analysis of Metaphorical Conceptions of душа/dusza/duša (ʻsoulʼ) in Slavic Languages (Russian, Polish, and Croatian)

The concept of soul serves as a cue to revealing and understanding existential representation of human immaterial nature in different cultures, thus being one of the basic elements which forms the linguistic picture of the world fixed in national mentality. A great body of research is based on the idea that the concept of soul concerns several key issues in human life: the source of life, cognition and emotion, personality traits, social relationships, and human destiny. The concept of soul has been actively studied from mythological, religious, philosophic,  cognitive, sociological and psychological perspectives. A number of authors have analyzed the concept of soul from the point of view of its linguistic representation in different languages: Wierzbicka (1989; 1992); Shmelev (1997); Mikheev (1999); Vardanyan (2007); Kolesnikova (2011); Tszin (2010); Uryson (1999); etc. Our research differs from the previous ones in the sense that it is cross-linguistic, corpus-based and cognitive in nature. This paper is an attempt to carry out a cross-linguistic, corpus-based and cognitive analysis of the concept in question in three Slavic languages: Russian (East Slavic), Polish (West Slavic), and Croatian (South Slavic).