Analysing nostalgia in cross-linguistic perspective

This paper presents a contrastive semantic analysis of the English nostalgia, the Italian nostalgìa and the Japanese natsukashii adopting the methodology of the Natura! Semantic Metalanguage. It is argued that: (i) emotion terms of different languages reflect different and culture-specific conceptualisations ofhuman feelings; (ii) the Anglo conceptualisation of feelings is not valid for ali cultures; (iii) linguistic analysis is centrai to the analysis of human feelings. The paper challenges the claim made by some psychologists that the English word nostalgia expresses a feeling which is ''pancultural" and criticizes the use ofEnglish emotion terms as the basis for discussions on human feelings.