Abstract
The present study investigates the adjectival profiling of shame from a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective.
This concept, overarching the field of negative self-evaluative emotions, is operationalized through two lexical categories
(‘shame’ and ‘embarrassment’) that are comparable in the languages under investigation. The usage of the adjectival exponents of
these categories is analyzed in four communities of British English, American English, French, and Polish. The study has two
goals, one descriptive, the other methodological. Firstly, it aims to identify the conceptual structuring of the two lexical
categories relative to their respective socio-cultural contexts. The result will be four sets of culture-sensitive usage profiles.
Secondly, the study further advances corpus-driven quantitative methodology for the description of intersubjectively-grounded
abstract concepts. The results obtained here provide partial evidence for the existence of a cultural continuum ranging from the
Anglo-Saxon communities, through France to Poland along the descriptive dimension of individualism-collectivism.
Women-related Ideologies in Egyptian Arabic and American English Proverbs and Sayings: A Cross-cultural Linguistic Analysis