Original scientific paper
Cognitive foundations of emotion verbs complementation in Croatian
Branimir Belaj
orcid.org/0000-0002-2334-9673
; Faculty of Philosophy, Osijek
Goran Tanacković Faletar
; Faculty of Philosophy, Osijek
Abstract
The paper looks into emotion verbs complementation in Croatian with the help of the
methodological apparatus of Cognitive Grammar. The authors set off from the psychological
research into categorization of human emotions (Shaver, Schwartz, Kirson & O’Connor
1987) which, next to the main division of emotions into positive and negative, proposes
intensity and degree of their activation potential as basic categorization criteria. The authors
try to make clear and unambiguous the connection between, on the one hand, highly
schematic concepts based on the dynamics of spatial relations which unify specific case
meanings (the concept of origin for the genitive, the concept of directedness for the dative,
the concept of target for the accusative and the concept of parallelism for the instrumental),
and case marking of emotion verb complements, on the other. In order to achieve
that, they analyse and explain, in particular, the close connection between encyclopedic
knowledge and the concept of origin, and the genitive marking of verb complements in
examples such as stidjeti se koga/čega (to be ashamed of something/somebody). Furthermore,
in the examples such as ponositi se kim/čim (to be proud of something/somebody) they
establish the motivation for the instrumental coding of the complement in the correlation
of different affective experiences with the scheme of parallelism. With the analysis of
these and other examples the authors point out to the fact that case marking of verb
complements in this group is semantically motivated, deeply rooted in the encyclopedic
knowledge and everyday experiences, and thus, deeply connected with spatial concepts.
Keywords
verbs; emotions; Croatian language; Cognitive Linguistics
Hrčak ID:
74644
URI
Publication date:
5.12.2011.
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