A Pragmalinguistic Study of Emotion Verbs in Standard English and Cairene Arabic

Document Type : Academic research papers

Author

Girls college Ain Shams University - Egypt

Abstract

This research is an attempt at understanding the emotion verbs in English and Cairene Arabic, in terms of their syntactic, and semantic categories. It shows the similarities and differences between Cairene Arabic and Standard English emotion verbs. These verbs differ from the other types of verbs. This study tries to investigate the phenomenon of emphasis on various levels: the semantic, the syntactic, and finally the pragmatic level. Psychological verbs (“psych-verbs”) such as admire, amaze, fear, and frighten, love, have long been known to exhibit marked syntactic behavior in many languages. This behavior has inspired numerous analyses which assume that there is a unified explanation for the observed patterns. Through qualitative and quantitative analyses of the semantic properties of emotion verbs and their arguments. In order to accomplish such a task, one must follow a systematic approach of linguistic analysis. First, one must specify the distinctive properties of every verb in a language. Second, one should account for what types and number of arguments i.e. case roles associated with each verb. Finally, one must group each verb according to its syntactic behavior, which is, for the most part, dictated by the denoted meaning of the verb.

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