Dictionary Representation of the Semantics of Adjectives Signifying Emotions

Abstract Naming emotions may pose a serious problem for foreign language learners as emotion words constitute a complex semantic field. Here is where monolingual learners’ dictionaries turn out to be useful. The paper reports on a comparative analysis of dictionary representation of the semantics of adjectives signifying emotions. To investigate the treatment of this semantic field, twenty-four adjectives are looked up in the five British pedagogical dictionaries published by Oxford, Cambridge, Longman, Macmillan and Collins. The qualitative analysis concentrates on definitions as primary carriers of meaning. Yet, examples, grammatical information and additional sources of information within a dictionary entry are also given attention. The study demonstrates that some inconsistencies in defining emotion words in individual dictionaries can be spotted. The value of examples is limited: some focus merely on presenting a word’s syntactic properties. Thus, the combination of the definition and the examples both clarifying meaning and illustrating the typical use of the words is judged to best represent meaning. The paper suggests model definitions of adjectives signifying emotions and offers recommendations aiming at improving the representation of their meaning in dictionaries.