Ways and means of expressing despair in the Russian language worldview

This article explores the ways of displaying despair in the Russian language worldview. Emotional concepts can certainly be explored by the empirical rules of meaning, because if the words denote emotions, we can determine their meaning in relation to speaker’s feelings. However, an intensional definition gives the meaning of words by specifying the way they should be used. There is a way that an emotion might be in the world as the language is. According to the National Corpus of Russian language the propositional model includes information that in most familiar manifestations of despair takes hold, masters and even kills. In metaphorical projection it is determined in relation to the representatives of other subject areas, including calculated resource, the water flow or the living creature. By analogy with any resource, the despair is collected ; by analogy with a water flow, it spills and overwhelms ; by analogy with a living creature, it can move and worry. Furthermore, such use becomes so common, that the speakers no longer pay attention to metaphorical expressions like surge of impotent despair or wave to overcome his despair but take them at face value as an objective characteristic of despair. This way of displaying is compatible with the speaker ’s current knowledge. It is true in the world as they think it is.