COCA as a Representative Corpus for the Study of Basic Emotions in Contemporary English
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.28925/2412-2491.2026.262Keywords:
COCA, basic emotions, nominal emotion labels, collocation, valency, corpus linguisticsAbstract
The article explores six nominal labels for basic emotions in contemporary English, based on the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): anger, fear, sadness, happiness, disgust, and surprise. The selected nouns are not interpreted as direct evidence of inner affective experience. They are analysed as lexical units whose corpus profile is formed by recurrent co-occurrence, grammatical relations, collocational environment, clusters, and concordance contexts. The study combines procedures of corpus linguistics with lexical-semantic interpretation and linguistic research on emotion. The theoretical basis includes work on corpus representativeness, lexical semantics, the theory of basic emotions, and the distinction between emotion-label words and emotion-laden words. COCA was selected because its register-balanced and chronologically stratified design makes it suitable for analysing contemporary American English usage. The material was obtained using the COCA tools Word, Topics, Collocates, Clusters, Texts/Virtual Corpora, and Concordance Lines. The frequency distribution in the six-item sample is as follows: fear - 103,493; surprise - 60,286; anger - 36,471; happiness - 22,057; sadness - 8,851; disgust - 5,436. The analysis prioritises not frequency lists in isolation, but recurrent lexico-grammatical patterns. Fear occurs mainly with nominal and clausal complementation; anger is characterized by prepositional directionality and verbs of expression or regulation; sadness is profiled through intensifiers and perceptible signs; happiness regularly enters axiological contexts of well-being, aspiration, and life purpose; disgust combines bodily aversion with moral evaluation; and surprise functions both as a nominal label for an unexpected event and as a marker of its expectedness or unexpectedness. The findings indicate that COCA makes it possible to describe nominal emotion labels not merely as dictionary entries, but as contextually profiled units of the language system.
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