On Some Universal and Specific Semantic and Cognitive Aspects of the Emotive Joy in English

Abstract

The most widespread distinction made between emotions seems to be their being positive or negative; however, there is much more to their linguistic study. Joy is seen as one of the primary emotions and is thus indispensable as an example of a positive emotion, which can open the doors to the understanding of emotives in the English language and their universal and specific aspects. The paper aims at a better understanding of both universal and specific semantic and cognitive aspects of the given emotion which in linguistics is studied under the term of an emotive. To achieve this purpose the methods of corpus analysis and metaphor analysis have been applied. The study has revealed that positive denotation and almost similar levels of intensity are the universal semantic and cognitive features of the emotive joy.