In:Historical Linguistics 2013: Selected papers from the 21st International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Oslo, 5-9 August 2013
Edited by Dag T.T. Haug
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 334] 2015
► pp. 233–256
Hate and anger, love and desire
The construal of emotions in Homeric Greek
Published online: 1 October 2015
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.334.13lur
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.334.13lur
In Homeric Greek verbs that indicate negative emotions such as anger, hate, and envy take the NominativeDative construction, while verbs that indicate love, desire, and affection take the NominativeGenitive construction. The two constructions are typical of different verb classes: the former mainly occurs with verbs of social interaction, while the latter is mostly associated with verbs of hitting, touching, and striving. A further difference between the two groups of emotion verbs is that only verbs that indicate negative feelings are used in the imperative and co-occur with cause expressions. We argue that the extension of either construction to verbs of emotion accounts for different construals: while situations of anger, hate and envy are construed as interactive, with an agent that initiates an event and a second participant that may react, love and desire are construed as uncontrolled and not interactive.
Keywords: constructions, experiencer, experiential situations, stimulus, verb classes
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Cited by (3)
Cited by three other publications
Ovsjannikova, Maria & Sergey Say
Luraghi, Silvia
2014. Plotting diachronic semantic maps. In Perspectives on Semantic Roles [Typological Studies in Language, 106], ► pp. 99 ff.
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