Sémantique des noms et des verbes d’affect : un parcours chronologique et épistémique

This paper examines the linguistic properties of psych-nouns and verbs through a synthesis of the most important studies on the French lexicon of emotions of the last 50 years. The pioneer works on psych-verbs pre-determined to some extent the way psych-Nouns—often derived from verbs—are analyzed; thus the argumental structure, aspect, semantic relations and the combinatory are the key-notions of these studies. It appears that the linguistics classes of psych-verbs and nouns have been partly defined on the basis of onomasiological criteria, which explains the internal polysemy and syntactical heterogeneity of the two classes. The linguistic description is followed by a discussion about the dynamics of the linguistic study of psych-verbs and nouns, partly due to the development of automatic tools offering corpus-linguistic insights in the functioning of the lexicon, and thus leading to more transversal issues.