Feeling, emotion and the company they keep: what adjectives reveal about the substantives feeling and emotion

Abstract

This paper analyzes the adjectives modifying the substantives emotion and feeling in contemporary American and British English. It argues that although the two nouns refer to affects and are treated as synonyms in dictionary definitions, they are not semantic equivalents. The study of their collocations with adjectives shows that emotion refers to pre-semantic experience, whereas feeling designates affects that have been the object of a more elaborate cognitive treatment. This paper also aims to show that the semantic characteristics of the two substantives reflect their morphology and their historical evolution.

Keywords

• feeling
• emotion
• expression of affects
• collocations
• adjectives
• lexical semantics