Frame semantics and verbs of emotion

The intersection of lexical semantics and syntax has been an important area of
 linguistics for some time. Verbs as the core of the lexicon are key to exploring the
interaction between syntax and semantics and to understanding the nature of the
lexicon. The study focuses on verbs of emotion in the Bulgarian language and their
frame semantics. An overview of theoretical and empirical observations forms the
general aim of the study. Neutral, positive and negative verbs of emotion are
discussed and the results are summarised. The analysis is based on the semantic and
partly morphological information of the lexical units from the WordNet (Fellbaum
1998) as well as on the semantic and syntactic features with which the investigated
emotion verbs are represented in the FrameNet (Fillmore et al. 1998, Ruppenhofer
et al. 2016). Five semantic frames are documented, which were selected due to their
high frequency and the wide variety of lexical units they are evoked by. The de-
scription includes grammatical features of the lexical units, semantic and syntactic
restrictions that verbs impose on the frame elements, and the assignment of the
frame elements to a WordNet noun synset or subtree that reflects the realisation of
the frame elements in context. The status of the frame elements, which is essential
for the realisation of a lexical unit, is retrieved from FrameNet.