Some remarks on “pain” in Latin American Spanish

The aim of this chapter is to examine the Spanish counterpart of pain, that is, the lexeme dolor. It seems that dolor, different from both English pain and French douleur, has two clearly distinguishable meanings, dolor1 referring to physical (and emotional) sensation of pain, and dolor2, a quite frequent emotion term belonging to the domain of “sadness.” This article examines different lexical occurrences of the word dolor, coming inter alia from tango lyrics, in order to support the above hypothesis.

• Affiliations: 1: Australian National University