Open Access

Eva Cieślarová

• This article examines the expression and description of fear in German and Czech phraseology. Fear – one of the primary emotions – is viewed in a broad sense. The analysis of this semantic field also includes such variations as anxiety, panic, fright, horror, and terror. As it is impossible to cover the full phraseological range for this semantic field in both languages, the boundaries of the corpus were set with reference to the repertoire of expressions included in selected phraseological dictionaries. The use of these idiomatic expressions in practice was verified with reference to large-scale corpora in the individual languages. The article offers an analysis of the corpus from a cognitive perspective. For each of the languages, the first step was to identify the concepts which are mediated via selected phraseological expressions. The concepts were then compared, revealing similarities and differences between German and Czech in this respect.