Lexis to Denote Emotions: Problems and Prospects of Creating Word List

Abstract

The article discussed the researches about emotions which were done by Ukrainian scholars in the field of linguistics, analyzes ways to create a list of emotion-related words and criteria for their selection, suggests methods and criteria that can be used to distinguish words to denote emotions in the Ukrainian language. According to the results of the research, most linguistics works in Ukraine about emotions study semantic fields and idiomatic-semantic fields of specific emotions. Methods and criteria for selecting words to describe emotions in English, German, Polish, Korean, Estonian, Chinese, and Ukrainian were analyzed. The following most common methods were identified: field research, selection of words to denote emotions from individual texts and corpora, and selection of words from lexicographical sources. The article analyzes how words to denote emotions can be selected in the Ukrainian language from lexicographic sources on the example of an explanatory dictionary and a dictionary of synonyms. The criteria that can be relied on in such a selection of words are proposed. In particular, to distinguish words to denote emotions using an explanatory dictionary, we can generally suggest the following way: 1. Analyze through which word the words that exactly belong to emotions are most often interpreted. In our case, it is the word «почуття» (feeling). 2. From the dictionary, write out the words that are interpreted through “почуття + word in the genitive case”. 3. Write out the words that are interpreted through “те саме, що (the same as) + one of the words from the list obtained at the previous stage”, “протилежне (opposite) + one of the words from the list already obtained”, “див. (see) + one of the words from the already received list”. 4. Write out the words that are interpreted through synonyms for words from the already obtained list. To separate words to denote emotions using a dictionary of synonyms, we suggest the following way: 1. Choose the source words that exactly are emotion labels. 2. Write out the synonyms for these words from the dictionary. 3. Write out the synonyms to the list of words obtained at the previous stage (to avoid the words that are not related to emotions, but have become a part of the synonymous series due to the homonymy and polysemanticism of words, the meaning of words could be checked in the explanatory dictionary according to the criteria described in the previous method).