The paper analyzes a lamenter attitude towards her lament. In her other papers the author analyzed laments as a ritual folkloric text with a melody, which imitates weeping. The texts consist of folkloric formulas aiming to a communication with the dead. The lamentations are performed in funeral and commemoration feasts by special women called lamenters. The article researches lamenters’ emic (existing within the culture) attitude of lamenters towards the question of improvisation. By the material from interviews and comments appearing in the process of recordings of lamentations, it is proved that the idea of lamenting as an expression of grief is part of the lamenters’ emic concept of funeral lament. The texts of the bailichkas and oral narratives define two types of lamenters: a professional one, working for a fee, and a grieving relative, spontaneously beginning to lament at the funerals of relatives, and it is the second one, who becomes a protagonist. Tales of learning the lament also work on this idea. Despite the practice of training before the first lament, lamenters were to maintain an illusion of spontaneity and personal emotional involvement. Thus, the ethical notion of a lamenter as a ritual specialist, which was formed as the result of a long and careful analysis of texts and practices, contradicts not only the ‘romantic’ view of the world of the first collectors of folklore, but also the emotional representation that exists within the culture.