Rillen van angst en blaken van zelfvertrouwen

Abstract

Dutch van is used to mark emotions and feelings which cause bodily reactions and mental states in combinations such as rillen van angst 'shiver with fear', sprakeloos van verbazing 'speechless with astonishment' and blaken van zelfvertrouwen 'beam with self-confidence'. The classification of emotions along the four dimensions of evaluation (valence), potency (control), activation (arousal) and (un)predictability of Fontaine ( 2006) is discussed and shown to be of linguistic interest. Predicates such as stralen 'beam' or het uitschreeuwen 'to cry (it) out' have strong collocation relations with words denoting emotional extremes on one of the four axes, such as high valence or high arousal. While most of the paper is devoted to the construction with causative van, some suggestive evidence from adverbs of degree is offered to make a broader case for the usefulness of the four dimensions in linguistic research.