Abstract
The article describes the category of tenderness introduced to fiction and literary
theory in the works of Olga Tokarczuk. From the perspective of cognitive linguistics, it is
regarded as a schematic concept which, in the conceptualization of a scene, is marked by
positive expressions. At the same time, it is one of the cognitive domains constituting the
conceptual content of positive emotions and feelings experienced towards the world, here,
in particular, towards animals. The article discusses some possible types of conceptual
metaphors and gives examples of their manifestations. Moreover, imaginative schemes
are distinguished that are the basis of conceptualization of selected categories of the world
presented in the work.