The experiencer in emotional predicates: linguistic coding and related prototypical meanings

Abstract

The work presented here, which is based on the theoretical framework of Cognitive Linguistics, provides a characterization and a classification of the semantic values associated with the emotional experiencer depending on his/her syntactic and grammatical codification. More precisely, it offers a classification of the different types of emotional experiencers based on the kind of syntactic construction in which they appear (secondary-predicate, copulative, intransitive, middle or transitive constructions), and on the grammatical function that codifies them (subject, direct object, indirect object, etc.). The classification that we propose relies mostly on the level of the experiencer’s involvement and active participation in the emotional event. In a second part, we describe the results of a comparative analysis between French and Spanish, revealing some differences in the manner of representing the experiencer of the emotional event in both languages.