Using corpus methodology for semantic and pragmatic analyses: What can corpora tell us about the linguistic expression of emotions?

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to explore some of the possibilities, advantages and difficulties of corpus-based analyses of semantic and pragmatic aspects of lan- guage in one particular field, namely the linguistic expression of emotion con- cepts. For this purpose, a methodological procedure is proposed and an exem- plary analysis of the emotion concept “fear” in English is performed. The procedure combines Kövecses’ lexical approach and Stefanowitsch’s meta- phorical pattern analysis with additional concepts from corpus linguistics such as semantic preference and semantic prosody. The results of the study show that such a corpus-based analysis of emotion words offers several advan- tages. Firstly, by exploring the surroundings of the search word in a vast amount of text, we are not only able to find evidence of conceptual metaphor and metonymy that structure the emotion concept and of related emotion con- cepts, but also we can enrich the description of the emotion concept with infor- mation from a series of dimensions and add a pragmatic viewpoint by reveal- ing an explicit or implicit evaluation of the emotion. The second advantage offered by a corpus-based approach lies in the possibility of quantifying re- sults, i.e., comparing the frequency, productivity and creative use of individual metaphors and metonymies, which is especially interesting in view of contras- tive studies.