What the GRID can reveal about culture-specific emotion concepts: a case study of Russian 'toska'

This chapter explores the applicability of the GRID method in research on culture-specific emotion concepts. Our case-study considers the Russian emotion concept ‘toska’ frequently reported to be among ‘key’ concepts in the Russian culture characterized by both cultural saliency and ‘untranslatability’ into other languages. Deriving from the controversy in lexicographers and semanticists’ views about its meaning, the chapter empirically explores two hypotheses, namely, that toska is an emotional ‘blend’ of sadness and anxiety (Hypothesis 1) or that toska is primarily a sadness word in Russian (Hypothesis 2). Although the results provide more robust support to the latter contention, we also show that the GRID method aptly specifies the degree of gradual overlap of the meaning of toska with anxiety/fear terms in Russian (allegedly important for its meaning), and, more importantly, allows the pinning down of which emotion dimensions and features foreground this overlap