engleski

Semantic and syntactic analysis of emotion words in English

This paper focuses on the relationship between conceptual metaphors and grammatical constructions in emotion words. More specifically, it describes the use of emotion nouns in two syntactic constructions: (a) “to be”+ full verb past participle + “by” + emotion noun (corpus example: “Whether that affection is real or driven by fear is hard to tell.”) ; (b) “to be” + “full verb past participle” + “with” + emotion noun (corpus example: “He was filled with anger and sorrow.”). Both constructions are passive constructions with the agent not omitted. So, if emotion nouns are looked at within these environments, the following may be presupposed: (1) Due to the prepositions controlling the noun, the noun will act either as the agent of the action, or the instrument of the action ; (2) The participles and adjectives will provide information on what emotions themselves “do” (as opposed to only asking what can be done with them in Dziwirek and Lewandowska) and what kinds of effects they can have on the experiencer ; (3) Making the consequence or effect of an emotion the focus means we also focus on the last part of the structure of the master metaphor for emotions. The following emotion nouns were selected: awe, desire, fear, hate, jealousy, joy, love, worry. The data was obtained from the Corpus of Contemporary American English, and checked for metaphoricity using the Pragglejazz procedure (Pragglejazz 2007). The results show that the preposition “by” introduces the notion of agency when used with emotions. Even though MacMillan offers some definitions of “by” governing a noun as a semantic instrument, none of these seem to apply to the emotion results. What this implies is that the most usual way speakers of American English conceptualize emotions is as outside forces that either incite or impede action of the targets of their influence, i.e., forces that control our conscious selves and our behavior, following the main metaphorical principle of EMOTIONS ARE FORCES. "With" is less straightforward in its construal of emotion nouns and their experiencers, being able to present the emotion both as an agent and an instrument in different cases (depending on the action of the verb of the participle). The most salient mental image of this construal with speakers of American English, however, seems to be that of the emotion being a liquid capable of filling up the container that is the experiencer of the emotion. Conceptually, being filled with substance means that the substance is essentially "in control" of its container – meaning that this category is consistent with the EMOTIONS ARE FORCES metaphoric principle. Overall, the results show that all aspects of the construction – its passivity, choice of emotion word as well as choice of preposition – influence the specific metaphorical construal, but its schematic construal goes hand-in-hand with the general EMOTIONS ARE FORCES metaphor.

conceptual metaphor; grammar; emotion words; the passive construction

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