Fabienne Baider Hate: Saliency Features in Cross-cultural Semantics The popular dictionary meaning of hate and the sociological meaning that underlay the adoption of the term should be reconciled with its cultural and political context. (B. Perry, A crime by any other name, 2005.) Introduction This study attempts to define Cypriot-Greek and Franco-French intra-culturality on the basis of oral and written synchronic data in reference to the emotion called hatred. Our first, and most practical, aim is to make recommendations target- ing the lexical needs of exchange students – this will not only improve language learning but will enhance cross-cultural communication among the students. On the theoretical level, the collected data allow identification of public knowledge and the salient collective features (Kecskes 2008) related to the lexical unit hatred within each community as well as variations of salient features across both com- munities. Indeed, if we consider the Dynamic Model of Meaning Framework (Kecskes 2008), then we will see that the role of public knowledge (common to all individuals in a given community) in defining certain facets of the private context (specific to one individual and based on his/her unique experience) may be dif- ferent even within the culture: this variation in saliency suggests that an align- ment of the public knowledge with the private context is valid for some, but not all, communities within the same society. 1 What is Hatred? Love is a much-debated, studied and commented-upon emotion in semantics and pragmatics: it is the topic of many an article by semanticists in cross-cultural studies such as Anna Wierzbicka. But hatred? Draft