The aim of this study is to analyse a corpus of expressions referring to the emotions of JOY and FEAR in English and in Lingala (a language spoken in the Democratic Republic of Congo) with the help of the tools of analysis proposed by Cognitive Linguistics. The purpose of the analysis is to verify whether the hypothesis advanced by psychologists that human emotions are universal is supported by the linguistic data from Lingala or whether emotive expressions in this language support the view held by some linguists that the conceptualisation (mental representation) of emotive categories, as manifested in language, is culture-dependent. The corpus under analysis consists of 250 examples in Lingala which express the emotions of BOBANGI (FEAR) and BOSEPELI (JOY). These examples come from everyday spoken language and from the official translation of the Bible into Lingala. Metaphorical and metonymic expressions of FEAR and JOY in Lingala are compared with expressions of these two emotions in English in order to determine which aspects of the cognitive categories FEAR/BOBANGI and JOY/BOSEPELI are specific to the culture represented by the language used. The analysis will also show if in Lingala, as has been demonstrated for English, the human body is the source of metaphorical and metonymic expressions of FEAR and JOY. (Dissertation Abstracts)