Fear. Linguistic portrait of the term in high school students' speech

Małgorzata Karwatowska

Uniwersytet w Białymstoku

Abstract

The aim of the research is to reconstruct the understanding of a word fear by youth learning at high school as well as words that are formally and/or meaningfully close to it. The experiment required answering the questions included in the survey that were formulated in such a way as to provide information referring to three basic issues: 1. How is the noun fear understood? 2. How does it connect with adjectives and verbs? 3. What are the semantic directions of this collocation? The author starts the analysis of the material acquired from the youth from a description of external manifestations of fear assuming that both human face expression and body language become interesting for a linguist when they adopt a linguistic form. The answer to the question how the students expand a semantic field of fear, and whether they are guided by some semantic fixed values being opposite to relative values while understanding this word, seemed equally interesting. Thus collected material has been analyzed and interpreted from numerous perspectives: the collocation of the word fear with adjectives and verbs, defining the term, and the process of metaphorization and rhetoric. To sum up, the author concludes that the youth understand the word fear perfectly well, which can be proved by the modifiers she quotes referring to the analyzed category.