A Pragmatic Approach to English Emotion [Adjective + Preposition] Collocations

This study describes diverse uses of emotion collocations among native speakers by investigating how the meaning of emotion words is affected by the situational context of an utterance. Previous semanticists (Dirven, 1997; Osmond, 1997; Kim, 2015) claimed that long-term emotion adjectives tend to collocate with the prepositions with and about, whereas short-term emotion adjectives combine with at and by. However, although it was less frequently observed in COCA, emotion adjectives combined with a much wider range of prepositions regardless of the semantic quality that the emotion adjective possessed. Looking into the situation surrounding the emotion collocations led to the conclusion that the choice of preposition in emotion collocations is not merely constrained by the semantic quality of the emotion adjective itself. Instead, the context of the utterance allows emotion adjectives to combine with a wide range of prepositions irrespective of the durational component of the emotion adjectives. This study concludes that the whole context, not the emotion adjective in isolation should be considered for the collocation rule, as emotions in one’s mind may not correspond to the parallel language forms.