Dictionnaires, collocations, argumentations : regards croisés sur les émotions

Abstract

This article is based on a research project currently being carried out at Heidelberg University, and inspired by Christian Plantin. We present some considerations on how a multidimensional approach can be used to analyse emotions. In the first step, we examine emotions as objects of argumentation in the EuroParl and OpenSubtitles corpora. In the second step, we conduct a study of the lexical field of terms denoting suffering in French, beginning with an analysis of the most frequent collocations, an approach which enables us to provide a detailed semantic description of this lexical field. In the last step, the results of the analysis of the collocations of haine ‘hate’ are compared to the results obtained by Christian Plantin in his examination of the network of references between selected terms and other entries in monolingual dictionaries. Our current studies are by no means complete, and cannot therefore be considered to provide definitive results, but they clearly illustrate the usefulness of a multidimensional perspective on emotions and thus show the importance of Christian Plantin’s research in this field.

Keywords

• emotions
• argumentation
• collocations
• lexicographical approach
• souffrance ‘suffering’
• haine ‘hate’