The basis for the analysis are the grammatical profiles (relative distribution of morphological cases in corpus data) of 65 high-frequency (>1000 attestations in Czech National Corpus) Czech nouns describing emotions. We visualise the grammatical profiles using correspondence analysis, which groups emotion nouns according to similarities in their overall case distribution.
We focus on the semantic field of emotion and affective states and explore how selected emotion-related lexemes can be described as structured groups as a complement to traditional lexicographic descriptions of individual dictionary entries. While dictionaries are traditionally organised alphabetically or as thesauri, targeted descriptions of specific semantic fields may provide a useful and accessible complement for both specialist and non-specialist users. Our study builds on the long-established view of the lexicon as a network of interrelated items organised into semantic fields (cf. Mel’čuk 1988; Fellbaum 1990; Fraser 2008; Wishart 2018). Rather than assuming fixed or purely intuitive categories, this perspective shows the importance of examining relations and patterns shared by groups of closely related lexemes. Recent lexicographic research further suggests that treating such lexemes in isolation may obscure systematic regularities within a field, as demonstrated, for example, in analyses of emotion-related adjectives (Halczak 2023). Adopting this perspective, the present analysis approaches emotions as lexemes whose meanings emerge through recurrent grammatical and collocational behaviour. Rather than focusing on definitions alone, it examines how emotion nouns pattern in actual usage: which grammatical cases they favour, which verbs and adjectives they combine with, and how they co-occur with other affective terms. This usage-based approach allows the affective domain to be described as a structured and internally differentiated area of the lexicon.
This study is the basis for a presentation entitled “Emotions in Context: A Semantic Field Viewed through Grammar and Collocation”, co-authored by Dominika Kováříková and Laura Alexis Janda at the XXII EURALEX International Congress 2026, 29.9.-03.10.2026 in Vienna, Austria, and published as an article in the proceedings from this conference.
(2026-05-08)
