Abstract
Emotion terms are usually subject to the mechanisms of semantic change. In French and Polish, the most typical ones are metonymic: emotion – cause (joie, radość ‘joy’), emotion – cause – causer (Y est le bonheur de Y, Y jest szczęściem X-a ‘Y is X’s happiness’), emotion – object (Y est l’amour de X, Y jest miłością X-a ‘Y is X’s love’). The first of these is the most characteristic type in both languages, whereas the metonymy emotion – a manifestation of emotion (des respects ‘expressions of respect’) is absent from the latter language. Not all Polish counterparts of French terms are subject to the same processes of semantic evolution, e.g. Pol. rozpacz and French désespoir ‘despair’.