This study examines sadness metaphors in Korean and Turkish within the framework of conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). While conceptual metaphor theorists such as Lakoff and Johnson (2003) emphasize the universality of metaphor based on embodied cognition, early discussions largely relied on English data. At this point, Kövecses (2005) introduced the notion of “variation,” suggesting that cultural factors may lead to differences in the metaphorical conceptualization of emotions across languages. In this context, the present study explores how Korean and Turkish conceptualize sadness and how cultural and historical factors shape these conceptualizations. It also contributes to the discussion on universality by presenting data from two non-Western languages.

The study is based on the Korean National Corpus and the Turkish National Corpus. By comparing the linguistic data drawn from these corpora, the similarities and differences between Korean and Turkish were identified through an analysis of the source domains used in the conceptualization of sadness.

The comparison shows that emotion metaphors in both languages align in many respects with findings from English, which are commonly cited in support of universality. However, the analysis also reveals a notable number of metaphors unique to Korean and Turkish. This result highlights the strong influence of cultural and geographical factors in shaping emotional conceptualization.

Overall, this study contributes to discussions on the universality of conceptual metaphor theory and demonstrates how Korean and Turkish speakers—who share several cultural parallels—conceptualize and express the basic emotion of sadness in notably similar ways.