Emotion word meaning and grammatical class: do nouns and adjectives mean the same?

Abstract

In the study of emotion across disciplines emotion labels such as ‘anger’, ‘fear’ or ‘joy’ are frequently used in experiments as stimuli or as response prompts. Both nouns (e.g., ‘anger’) and adjectives (e.g., ‘angry’) are used indistinctly, assumed to mean the same. However, grammatical class has been claimed to carry meaning, with nouns construing entities as “things” and adjectives as “qualities”. This could influence the way emotional experiences are represented in speakers' minds when emotions are coded in one or another grammatical form. Whether labels like ‘anger’ and ‘angry’ elicit different types of mental representation is an empirical question. To address it, we employ the GRID instrument, an interdisciplinary research tool designed to study the meaning of emotion words across languages and cultures. In the GRID studies, native speakers rate the likelihood that a number of emotion features may belong to the meaning of emotion words in their language. Earlier studies investigated the most representative 80 emotion nouns in English. In the current study we use the same instrument to study the adjectival form of those nouns. The results reveal no structural differences between the affective space captured by nouns and adjectives in English, and very high semantic profile correlations between both grammatical forms for each emotion concept. Specific differences between some noun-adjective pairs are presented. Finally, the study limitations and implications for the cross-disciplinary study of emotion are discussed.