Polish Serce ‘Heart’: Usage Patterns and Cultural Conceptualizations

This contribution focuses on the Polish lexeme serce ‘heart’ as a source domain for conceptualization. The research is based on phraseological material, as well as on language usage strategies and frequency criteria determined by corpus methodologies. Taking into account the former kind of evidence, it can be demonstrated that serce is mapped onto various target domains creating a relatively broad semantic network which resembles those of some other languages (e.g. English, Swahili). However, the examination of corpus concordances and collocations leads to a different picture, with a strong entrenchment of serce as a metaphorical container for emotions (especially those valued positively) and metonymic extensions based on this image schema. It is also argued that the Polish-specific cultural model, with conspicuous underrepresentation of other senses of ‘heart’, has emerged relatively recently in language history.