Blurb:

This chapter adopts an alternative viewpoint based on systemic-functional theory, according to which language is seen as the foundation of human experience (Halliday and Matthiessen 1999). It presents a systematic contrastive analysis of the language-specific preferences in the lexicogrammatical construction of four basic emotions in English and Spanish: ‘joy’, ‘fear’, ‘anger’ and ‘sadness’. This is achieved through an extensive empirical analysis based on comparable corpora in English and Spanish, which combines the qualitative, the quantitative and the contrastive dimensions. The purpose is to bring out the potential that lies behind emotional expressions in both languages through their corpus-based realisations and their associated probabilistic patterns.