Semantic shift of the type ‘fear activator— fear’ in a variety of languages

Abstract

The paper deals with fear activators, that is to say, the phenomena that produce fear, which is one of the basic human emotions. There may be different reasons behind fear, and it may be rational and irrational, based on the feeling of imminent danger or on the suppositions and predictions of probable events in the future. Psychology distinguishes between fear activa-tors such as quickly approaching objects, pain, solitude, death, tight spaces, darkness, and the unknown. Some of these activators have become the basis of naming fear in different lan-guages. The article employs the method of analysing semantic shifts, which reflect the chang-es in meanings of words that occur in various languages on a regular basis. Based on the wide array of languages, it concerns itself with the ‘a — fear’ semantic shifts, where ‘a’ stands for a fear activator in the worldview of a given language.