MWEs and the Emotion Lexicon: Typological and cross-lingual considerations

The work presented in this paper is aimed at studying predicates that pertain to
the semantic field of emotions, the focus being on Modern Greek verbal multiword
expressions (verbal MWEs) and their counterparts in French. A core lexicon of ver-
bal MWEs denoting emotion was extracted from existing Modern Greek lexical
resources; the initial list was further extended and revised manually in view of cor-
pus evidence. A classification of MWEs is proposed based on syntactic, selectional
and semantic properties; an attempt to map the expressions identified onto their
French counterparts was also made. The cross-linguistic study reveals similarities
and discrepancies in the two languages, and highlights the interaction between
MWEs structure and their underlying semantics, in that the intensity of the emo-
tion denoted and the degree of fixedness of the relevant expressions seem to be
highly correlated in both languages.