Verbs of Emotion in French and English

We undertook a detailed investigation of French and English verbs of emotion. Based on a prior classification of French emotion verbs (Mathieu, 2000, 2005), the corresponding English verbs were manually identified. An independent classification for each language yielded 27 shared classes and one class specific to English only. We matched the verbs and the classes crosslinguistically for both semantic and syntactic properties and considered some properties that cut across our classes. Lexically, emotion verbs exhibit the same phenomena familiar from other areas of the lexicon, such as systematic metaphoricity and different kinds of polysemy. We consider possible new ways of representing the emotion verb lexicon in WordNet.