A contrastive perspective on emotions: surprise

The objective of the present paper is a comparison of the GRID questionnaire and a cognitive corpus-based analysis, which are used to investigate a selection of emotions, particularly surprise and related concepts, in Polish and British English. The research questions asked concern the cross-linguistic status of emotion concepts and the identification of the universally valid tertium comparationis. Overlaps with other emotions both within Polish and English and between these languages are investigated and general conclusions concerning the nature of meaning that evolves from the study are presented.