Persistence of spatial meanings in the conceptualization of causality: at, by, with and about in emotion constructions

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Prepositions encode various causal forces when expressing emotion causality in emotion constructions. This study investigates two pairs of prepositions, the zerodimensional <jats:italic>at</jats:italic> and <jats:italic>by</jats:italic>, and the two- or three-dimensional <jats:italic>with</jats:italic> and <jats:italic>about</jats:italic>, which show contrasting collocation patterns in emotion constructions. Through a corpus analysis of the Corpus of Contemporary American English, this study claims that there is a strong tendency that zero-dimensional prepositions are used with short-term emotions, whereas two- or three-dimensional prepositions frequently occur with long-term emotions. This study argues that the constraints of distributions of prepositions with emotive adjectives can be accounted for by features of their spatial source meanings in early usages. In the framework of grammaticalization, the constraints of collocation patterns of two pairs of prepositions with emotive adjectives show the phenomenon with respect to the “persistence” of Hopper (1991) in which traces of the source lexemes are retained in the constraints of their distributions. This study is significant in that it suggests a typology of causality based on spatial dimensions of prepositions.</jats:p>

A Corpus-Based Study on Construction of “Anger Adjectives + Prepositions” in World Englishes

“…For the other varieties, most of them are closer to AmE except for SinE, which is closer to BriE. Albeit with the slight difference in CanE and PhiE where the temporal duration of annoyed is relatively longer than that of angry, the continuums of the temporal duration of the Anger adjectives for varieties except for BriE and SinE are similar and it is largely in agreement with Fontaine and Sherer (2013) and Kim (2018). Fontaine and Sherer (2013), from a psychological perspective, examine the differences in temporal duration of emotions within the same emotion cluster as well as among different clusters.…”

“…Similarly, Ku (2019, p. 11) argues that an emotional adjective combining with over refers to the event extending over the whole process that arouses one's emotion. A more recent study by Kim (2018) provides the definition of four prepositions, namely, at, by, with, about, used in the collocation of emotional adjectives and prepositions based on their source meaning and she classifies the four prepositions into different dimensions in terms of the dimensional typology of Rhee's as well as the source spatial meaning of prepositions. Kim (2018, p. 234) argues that prepositions in dimension 0 and 1 tend to collocate with short-term emotions while prepositions in dimension 2 and 3 tend to collocate with long-term emotions.…”

“…Among the very few studies focusing on the collocation of emotional words and prepositions, Dirven (1995Dirven ( , 1997 only focuses on the emotions expressed by prepositional phrases and Osmond (1997) fails to explain the relationship between the temporal duration of emotions and prepositions. More recently, Kim (2015Kim ( , 2018 and Ku (2019) investigates the collocation patterns of emotional adjectives with prepositions in semantics and pragmatics respectively, which are notable examples and provide inspiration for this study. However, their studies only focus on collocation of "emotional adjectives + prepositions" based on data from American English but fail to explore such patterns in a more global environment and thus fail to unveil the possible differences of such patterns that might be explained by cultural differences.…”

“…More obviously, in example (c), the use of the adverb "suddenly" helps to denote a sudden arousal of the emotion of anger. Kim (2018) investigates the collocation pattern of prepositions with the adverb suddenly and found that the adverb suddenly collocates with prepositions having the tendency of collocating with short-term emotions more frequently than prepositions having the tendency of collocating with long-term emotions. By contrast, in examples (b) and (d), the emotion of anger is longer because it can last for some time and has continued for a while.…”

“…Therefore, enlightened by the identification of temporal duration of emotions in Fontaine and Scherer (2013, pp. 142−145) and the researches on the collocation principle of emotional adjectives and prepositions in Kim (2015Kim ( , 2016Kim ( , 2018, this paper will explore the construction of "Anger adjectives + prepositions" in eight varieties of English, attempting to verify the relationship between varieties of English in terms of this construction, and thus to present a new insight of the relationship between them. This paper intends to answer the following research questions: a) What's the distribution of Anger adjectives in the English varieties?…”