A Local Grammar of Affect

Abstract

This chapter is about the analysis of lexico-grammatical patterns that are associated with emotion terms, that is, about words and word classes that precede or follow them. As in Section 2.5 (syntactic variation), a subset of emotion terms is used for this purpose because it was not feasible to analyze the patterns of more than 1000 emotion terms. Altogether, 15 emotion terms were analyzed in detail in the four sub-corpora: nine emotion adjectives (four ‘positive’, three ‘negative’ and two ‘neutral’), three emotion nouns (one ‘positive’, one ‘negative’ and one ‘neutral’) and three emotion verbs (one ‘positive’, one ‘negative’ and one ‘neutral’). Table 3.1 lists the terms that were analyzed.