| Different varieties of English arouse much interest in the field of linguistics.Emotion,as a crucial element of human experience,is often expressed with emotional adjectives(EAs)as in the construction of “EA + Prep”.In the construction,the prepositional collocate indicates the duration of the emotion expressed by the EA.Different varieties of English may have different continuums of the duration of EAs as indicated by the differences in the use of EAs and their prepositional collocates.By investigating the differences in the use of EAs and their continuums of the duration in corpora,this study is to verify the differences and similarities in the use of the construction of “EA + Prep” in eight varieties of English and present a new insight into the relations between the varieties of English based on the construction.The corpora cover eight varieties of English.American English(Am E)is taken from the Corpus of Contemporary American English and British English(Bri E)is taken from British National Corpus.The five varieties of English used in Canada(Can E),the Philippines(Phi E),Singapore(Sin E),India(Ind E)and Nigeria(Nig E)are from the International Corpus of English.A China English corpus(Chi E)is built of news texts crawled from Chinese English media.A list of 75 EAs are grouped into four emotion clusters of Joy,Sadness,Anger and Fear.Emotions are classified into long-term and short-term ones as indicated by the prepositional collocates of EAs.Tree Tagger is used to POS tag the corpora and Ant Conc is used to search the EAs and their prepositional collocates.By investigating the distribution of emotion clusters of EAs and that of the prepositional collocates of EAs,the continuums of the duration of emotion clusters and those of EAs within the same cluster in the eight varieties are generated and compared,producing the new circles of world Englishes based on the construction of “EA +Prep”.The results demonstrate that: 1)There is a consistency in the distribution of emotion clusters of EAs in the eight varieties,i.e.,EAs of the Joy cluster are most frequently used,followed by EAs of the clusters of Fear,Sadness and Anger;2)The continuums of the duration of emotion clusters of EAs in all the varieties are similar in that the duration of the Anger cluster is shorter than the other three clusters except Nig E in that the duration of the Anger cluster is relatively long;3)The continuums of the duration of EAs within the same cluster show obvious similarities and slight differences,i.e.,all the varieties except Phi E have similar continuums of the duration of EAs of the Joy cluster in that happy,satisfied,pleased,proud,interested,and comfortable have relatively long duration and fascinated has relatively short duration,while happy and fascinated have relatively short duration in Phi E;all the varieties except Phi E have similar continuums of the duration of EAs of the Sadness cluster in that ashamed,guilty and unhappy have relatively long duration and disappointed has relatively short duration,while disappointed has relatively long duration and guilty has relatively short duration in Phi E;Bri E and Sin E have similar continuums of the duration of EAs of the Anger cluster in that jealous,mad and angry have relatively long duration and annoyed has relatively short duration,while annoyed has relatively long duration and mad has relatively short duration in the other six varieties;Am E and Bri E have similar continuums of the duration of EAs of the Fear cluster in that anxious and worried have relatively long duration,followed by upset and concerned,while concerned has relatively long duration and upset has relatively short duration in the other six varieties.Based on the corpora of world Englishes,this study confirms the previous results of the duration of emotions from psychological experiments.This study verifies both universality and cultural difference of emotions in world Englishes,and the universality is major.This study enriches the existing research by approaching the construction of “EA + Prep” in world Englishes. |
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