29 September 2026 to 3 October 2026
OeAW Main Seat
Europe/Vienna timezone

Emotions in Context: A Semantic Field Viewed through Grammar and Collocations

2 Oct 2026, 16:00
30m
01 | Sitzungssaal (01 | Sitzungssaal, OeAW Main Seat, 1st floor)

01 | Sitzungssaal

01 | Sitzungssaal, OeAW Main Seat, 1st floor

Austrian Academy of Sciences Dr. Ignaz Seipel-Platz 2 1010 Vienna

Speakers

Dominika Kováříková (Charles University) Laura A. Janda (UiT The Arctic University of Norway)

Description

We examine Czech emotion nouns as a structured semantic field, adopting a field-level perspective that complements entry-level lexicographic description. The analysis is based on 65 nouns denoting emotions and related affective states, selected with reference to psychological classifications and corpus frequency. It combines grammatical profiling, correspondence analysis, and a brief collocational overview in order to show that these lexemes share certain patterns, some of them characteristic of the field as a whole and others pointing to its internal structuring. The results suggest that grammatical behaviour does not simply reflect semantic similarity in the usual psychological sense, but reveals different ways in which emotions are represented in language, for example as experienced states, emotional contents, agent-like forces, or states one is driven into. Collocational evidence points to broader tendencies across the field, including loss of agency, emotional intensity, bodily manifestation, regulation, and combination with other emotions. We argue that this kind of field-based description can complement traditional lexicographic practice and may also be attractive to dictionary users interested in contrasts between related words.

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