Abstract
This paper explores the semantic properties of lexical items used to express basic human emotions, such as happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise. Drawing from cognitive semantics and corpus linguistics, the study analyzes how these emotion words are structured, contextualized, and differentiated across English usage. Through semantic field analysis and collocational patterns, the research highlights how basic emotions are encoded linguistically and how their meanings shift depending on syntactic and pragmatic environments. The findings contribute to a deeper understanding of how language shapes emotional perception and communication.
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