Semantic and lexical specifics of the emotives, nominating sadness in English

Abstract

The article addresses a vital issue of nominations of human emotional state of sadness in English. As a part and parcel of daily life and communication, emotions are intrinsically connected to human linguistic behaviour. The research adheres to the anthropocentric paradigm that governs multiple research areas currently, thus making it relevant. Moreover, a combination of the methods used, namely, semantic, lexical, contextual, distributional analysis, combined with online tools and corpora, contributes to the research relevance. Given many triggers of the emotional state people face with on daily basis, the problem of nomination of emotions and finding reasons that lie behind them is a one of the ways to deal with it. The article aims at revealing the semantic and lexical peculiarities of the emotives, nominating sadness in English with reference to their contexts. 40 linguistic units, nominating sadness in English were collected from the dictionaries. About 1000 example sentences were elicited from corpora. The research was implemented in four stages. The structural classification reveled prevalence of verbal emotives with preposition of KV+prep+A type. Further, we focused on the combinatorial features of the emotives based on the British National Corpus texts and Google NGram viewer tool. The verbs be, feel, get are more common to collocate with the emotives under study. The semantics of the emotives is extended by the introduction of the semes increase, decrease and absence of a wide range of sadness triggers. Google NGram newspaper texts tend to resort to the emotives for the nomination of economic and political bodies rather than individuals.

Keywords

• emotion
• emotives
• sadness
• corpus
• context
• semantics
• meaning extension