Decepción, surprise, colère et furia Exploration d'une méthode statistique en lexicologie * Abstract: This article presents a corpus-based approach to the comparison of partial synonyms on an intra-and cross-linguistic level. The methodology is demonstrated using the example of three lexical fields in French and Spanish, all from the domain of the lexis of emotion: SURPRISE SURPRISE, , DISAPPOINTMENT DISAPPOINTMENT, , ANGER ANGER. After the intralinguistic analysis of French surprise/étonnement/stupeur and Spanish decepción/desencanto/desilusión/desengaño, the investigation is extended to include a cross-linguistic comparison of French colère/fureur with Spanish cólera/furia. As a first step, data that reveals the combinatory behaviour of the analysed lexical items is extracted from a corpus containing comparable quantities of French and Spanish literary and newspaper texts. The co-occurrences thus obtained are then divided into categories of lexical dimensions, e. g. intensity (furia desatada, honda decepción) or causation of emotion (déchaîner la colère, provoquer de la surprise), creating a «tertium comparationis» that allows for the comparison between partial synonyms or presumed equivalents in different languages. Finally, the actual analysis is performed using EmoGrammes -an instrument based on descriptive statistics allowing to aggregate and represent the results graphically. This heuristic method has proven particularly helpful in the complex folds of cross-linguistic comparison. * Ce travail s'inscrit dans le cadre du projet franco-allemand ANR Emolex, «Le lexique des émotions dans cinq langues européennes: sémantique, syntaxe et dimension discursive». (ANR-09-FASH 017). Site du projet: . Nous remercions Peter Blumenthal et Dirk Siepmann de leur relecture attentive d'une version antérieure de ce manuscrit.