The goal of this research project is to analyze children’s understanding of the concept of friendship by investigating symbolic representation in drawing and metaphoric expression in language. This research project is grounded in the conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), in which metaphor is defined as a conceptual-linguistic mapping between a source and a target domain. It uses qualitative, ethnographic research based on Spradley’s (1979) theory stating that meanings are derived from symbolically coded concepts where X is a symbol and Y is a referent. The researchers in this study, one from the USA and one from Poland, asked a group of preschool children to draw pictures of their friends. When the children finished their drawings, the researchers asked them 4 questions: “What did you draw?” “Why are they friends?” and “A friend is like…”, “A friendship is like…”. The results demonstrate that preschool children have the cognitive ability to understand the concept of friend and even differentiate between friends and playmates. In the study, the children could determine the number of their real friends, and for most children in both countries, it was 1 or 2 friends. In the group of American children, friendship (X) had two basic meanings (Y): helping (YH) and playing (YP). In Poland, friendship meant playing (YP) and being together after school (YBT). The children in both countries associated friends (target domain) with (source domain) certain people (FP), character quality (FCH), activity (FA) and (FO) object/places. A  comparison of the results demonstrates a difference in the number of friends the children claimed to have in Poland versus the USA. Additionally, the research showed that the American children drew only their friends without including themselves, while the Polish children included themselves in their pictures.

The theoretical and methodological framework of the undertaken considerations is determined by the basic conceptual categories – the linguistic image of the world, culture and values. In the analysis of their educational context, some assumptions were adopted from the field of linguistics and sociolinguistics (the perspective of the cultural context in linguistic research), social and cultural anthropology (with particular focus on its anthropocentric-cultural trend), axiology (its phenomenological orientation) and cognitive psychology (its cognitive-developmental theories). At the same time, the assumption was made that the study of the linguistic image of the value of friendship appreciated by learners from the Polish-Czech borderland enables treating language as a source of knowledge (anchored in their own experience and culture) about the ways they understand the world. In the analysis of qualitative empirical material, a reductive and expansive method of data processing was used, as well as the assumptions of the interpretative approach to the analysis of the statement meanings in the context of: understanding the respondents’ thoughts, critical common-sense understanding and theoretical understanding. In preparing a full description of the linguistic image of the value of friendship preferred by children, a phenomenological approach was also used, consisting in moving from individual textural-structural relations of meanings and the essence of the respondents’ experiences to a synthesis in the form of a description of their axiological experiences.