Patterns of allocentric emotional expressions, a contrastive study*

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to propose a detailed analysis of allocentric emotional expressions (AEE) like I am happy for you; She worries for him in English, French, Romanian and Russian. Joy, sadness, fear, and shame are the four emotional domains concerned by these constructions. The formal description of the AEE pattern within the frame of Construction Grammar is followed by a corpus-based study that highlights its semantic profile and pragmatic use. From a contrastive point of view, this pattern seems to obey the same constructionist constraints and to develop similar pragmatic functioning in the four languages, even though cultural and linguistic differences may be noted. Finally, this research questions the relationship between the pattern and the emotion-terms it selects, between constructions and cultural specificities.