PROSPECTS FOR CORPUS STUDYOF EMOTIVE VERBS IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Abstract

The paper focuses on the investigation of emotive verbs and their collocability in the context, examination of behavioural regularities of verbal lexemes in certain situational patterns, therefore, in the lexico-semantic system of the language, taken as a whole, that promotes profound insights into the semantics of lexical items with the emotive component. The basic parameters of the corpus, which served as the material for the research, have been defined. Corpus linguistics puts forward not only practical tools comprising lists of frequency and statistics, but encourages an in-depth study of the lexical structure that in our research is represented by the level of collocation, semantic prosody and semantic preference. The paper considers linguistic phenomena of semantic prosody that facilitates exploring connotative meaning in collocations. Interpretation of considerable amount of patterns of lexical items and their collocability is an essential prerequisite for detection of semantic prosody. Some verbal lexemes are characterized by positive or negative prosody, whilst a mixed type is quite rare. It has been established that semantic collocability and semantic prosody are characterized by close interaction and frequently share identical polarity, though treated as separate notions. Nevertheless, the meaning of the lexeme is not the direct reflection of positive/negative semantic prosody and collocability. Verbs with clearly expressed primary positive or negative component of meaning, normally preserve their dominant semantic prosody. A verbal lexeme is also capable of changing its environment from positive into negative one or vice versa with a plausible effect on semantic prosody, which can also undergo changes. The research has been based on semantic verb classes and their collocability with nouns, which allows us to identify latent verbal connotations. The correlation between the left-hand and the right-hand collocability has been studied. The identified neutral verbal lexemes proved to be potentially emotive due to the fact that they can receive either positive or negative emotive charge in their collocations. Thus, the corpus study of semantic prosody and semantic preference offers new prospects for the emotive lexis research.