Time in Portuguese saudade and other words of longing

The basic aim of this article is to see how the category of TIME relates to the domain of EMOTIONS. I believe that the dimension of TIME is important while defining emotion concepts and that the recognition of this fact can have profound consequences for cross-cultural psychology.¹ Drawing on some Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) explications of emotions² referring to ‘pain caused by distance’ in different languages, I am going to show the differences between various cultural conceptualisations of that ‘intersection’ of emotional spectrum. Comparing the Portuguese word saudade, roughly ‘longing’, with its Polish (tęsknota), Spanish (morriña), and Chinese (chou) counterparts,