A Cognitive-semantic Study of Verbal Complementation with Adjectives Expressing the Emotion of Fear in Canadian English

Abstract

This paper looks at the variation in Canadian English between to-infinitive and of + gerund-participle complements with six adjectives that have as part of their semantic makeup a notion of fear. Using data from the Strathy Corpus of Canadian English and the Canadian component of the Global Web-Based Corpus of English, it aims to explain the reasons underlying complement selection with these adjectives as well as temporal relations between the emotion expressed by the adjective and that expressed by the complement. The complementation patterns examined in this study are shown to be connected to certain of the conceptual metaphors that previous studies have observed to be utilized to conceptualize the emotion of fear.