Abstract
Anger as one of the basic emotions has attracted much attention. In the construction of “Anger adjectives + prepositions”, the temporal duration of the Anger adjectives is closely related to their prepositional collocates. Differences in the use of the Anger adjectives and their prepositional collocates might be captured in the world English varieties. The corpora used in this study cover eight varieties of English. The five varieties of English used in Canada, Philippines, Singapore, India and Nigeria are from the International Corpus of English (ICE). The China English corpus (ChiE) consists of news texts crawled from six Chinese English media. American English is taken from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and British English is taken from British National Corpus (BNC). By investigating the use of the Anger adjectives and their prepositional collocates in the eight varieties of English, this paper finds that, on the continuums of the temporal duration of Anger adjectives, most varieties of English are closer to American English, whereas only Singapore English is close to British English. The distribution of Anger adjectives in the English varieties is largely in accordance with the Concentric Circles of world Englishes whereas the continuums of the temporal duration of emotions present a new insight into their relations.
Highlights
Scientists have predicted that the 21st century will be the century for emotions
This paper conducts the comparison of the construction of “Anger adjectives + prepositions” in eight varieties of English
Distribution of the Anger adjectives in the English varieties is investigated and it is found that this distribution is largely in accordance with the Concentric Circles of world Englishes (Kachru, 2006, p. 196)
Summary
Scientists have predicted that the 21st century will be the century for emotions. It is argued that the use of emotional words can reflect cultural differences and they vary across languages and cultures (Wierzbicka, 1999, p. 34). Fontaine and Scherer (2013, p. 134) have argued that an emotional word has the component of duration, indicating how long the emotion lasts. 134) have argued that an emotional word has the component of duration, indicating how long the emotion lasts. By investigating the temporal duration of emotion clusters, they found out that among the emotion clusters, the anger cluster lasts relatively shorter than fear, sadness and joy. Prepositions serve an important role when collocating with emotional words. Scholars such as Kim Eunmi have claimed that there is a close relationship between the prepositional collocates of emotional adjectives and the temporal duration of the emotions they denote. Differences in the use of the Anger adjectives and their prepositional collocates in the different varieties of English are expected to be captured to show cultural differences
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