Emotion Adjectives: A corpus study of the use of terrified, petrified and horrified in British and American English

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School of Humanities G3, Bachelor‟s Course

English Linguistics Course Code: EN3103

Supervisor: Ibolya Maricic Credits: 15

Examiner. Maria Estling Vannestål Date: 27 May, 2009

Emotion adjectives

A corpus study of the use of terrified, petrified and horrified in British and American English

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Abstract

For many non-native speakers of English it can be difficult to distinguish semantic differences between near-synonyms. In order to create idiomatically correct sentences in a language it is important to know which word to use in a specific context. This study deals with the emotion adjectives terrified, petrified and horrified, which all refer to an emotion of fear of something that can or will happen. The present research aims at exploring the meanings of these adjectives, in American English and British English, and to discover which words these adjectives tend to collocate with. To obtain data a British Corpus and an American corpus were used with fiction and newspaper as subcorpora. A quantitative method was used where the frequencies of terrified, petrified and horrified were counted.

Secondly, the most frequent left- and right-hand collocates were studied. Due to the variety of collocations found, it was discovered that the meanings between the adjectives differ somewhat. The literal meaning of petrified is to be hard as a stone while the non-literal meaning is to be extremely afraid. The literal meanings of terrified and horrified are to be very afraid, but unlike terrified, horrified also seems to refer to being shocked. It can be stated that in accordance with how vague the adjective is in its meaning the more frequently it is used, i.e. terrified is the most frequent adjective in all subcorpora and in both varieties of English most frequently used while petrified is least frequently used.

Keywords: British National Corpus, collocate(s), collocation(s), Corpus of Contemporary American English, emotion adjectives, horrified, near-synonyms, petrified, terrified.

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1 Introduction

Learning one‟s native language is something that happens subconsciously. We often use words without ever reflecting very much on their actual meaning. It is however interesting to analyse words further and come to a better understanding of their meanings since they also reflect how we perceive the world. The English language has numerous words that seem to mean the same things. This paper focuses on three adjectives that according to many speakers of English can be seen as representing roughly the same emotion. They are often considered to be so called near-synonyms i.e.

their meanings are close but their contextual meanings differ somewhat (Cruse 2004:

156-157). Terrified, petrified and horrified are the adjectives that have been chosen for this study since all of them denote an emotion of fear of something that will or can happen. However, they are used in different contexts and for non-native English speakers it can be problematic to understand the difference between these adjectives.

Before the differences and the similarities between terrified, petrified and horrified can be established it is also important to define the concept of emotional language. What then is an emotion? The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (henceforth LDOCE) [www] defines emotion as “a strong human feeling such as love, hate, or anger”. The biologist Charles Birch (Wierzbecka 1999:1) argues that emotions are what matter most in life which is why it is fascinating to analyse emotional words.

A well-known scholar within the field of emotions is Robert Plutchik. He defines emotions as “complex states of the organism involving feelings, behaviour, impulses, physiological changes and efforts at control” (Plutchick (1991) in Wierzbecka 1999:1).

The present research is based on data from a British and an American corpus. The British National corpus (henceforth BNC) and The American Corpus of Contemporary English (henceforth COCA) were chosen, more precisely the newspapers and fiction subcorpora. This means that only written examples of sentences with terrified, petrified and horrified were studied.

1.1 Aim

The aim of this paper is to explore the meanings of the adjectives terrified, petrified and horrified in British and American English. It also aims at discovering what words they

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tend to collocate with. In order to fulfil this aim, the following research questions are addressed:

 What are the relative frequencies of these adjectives in BrE and AmE?

 With what kind of words do these adjectives collocate most often?

 Do they tend to collocate with the same words in both varieties of English?

 What differences in meaning, if any, are there between the emotion adjectives terrified, petrified and horrified?

1.2 Scope

The scope of this study is limited to two subcorpora in the COCA and the BNC. The left- and right-hand collocates of the node adjectives terrified, petrified and horrified are studied. However, not all words occurring in the company of terrified, petrified and horrified are studied but mainly nouns and intensifiers which are more important from a semantic perspective. Nouns and intensifiers are more interesting to investigate than conjunctions and determiners are since they add information and degree respectively to the adjectives.

2 Theoretical background

2.1 Words and emotion

Many psychologists and biologists prefer to talk about „emotions‟ rather than „feelings‟

since they regard emotions as more objective in the sense that they have a biological base. These scholars argue that it is only possible to scrutinize concepts that are real and objective (Wierzbecka 1999:1). Linguists, on the other hand, usually prefer to talk about affection rather than emotion. In standard linguistics, affect is used as a broad synonym for feeling and includes moods and attitudes as well as interactional linguistic phenomena such as hedging. In other words, affection is a general term for linguistically expressed feelings, attitude and moods of all types (Caffi & Janney 1994:327-328). In this study, however, the term emotion will be used in order to be as clear as possible and avoid ambiguity. That this term was chosen instead of affect depends on the adjectives that were chosen for this study. It seems more appropriate to use the term emotion for

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states like moods, attitudes and dispositions. Since it seems more accurate to use the term emotion for these adjectives this term is used in the following pages.

Now that the term emotion has been defined, it is interesting to discover how emotional words such as e.g. love are defined. When one looks up love in the LDOCE [www] this emotion is described as “a strong feeling of affection”. This is the case with most emotional words; they are vaguely described by using the definition of another emotion. This happens because the meaning of an emotional word is linked to the description of a feeling. That is to say, in order to understand what love is, one must understand what affection is and thus, one must understand the concept of love (Wierzbecka 1999:2-5). Some concepts are universal which means that we know them intuitively without anyone ever having explained them to us. One example of this sort of concept is feel. A child picks up the meaning of feel in social interaction before he or she learns to communicate. The concept of feel can therefore be used in order to explain more complex concepts such as love or emotion (Wierzbecka 1999:2-5).

2.2 Categorizing emotions and defining emotion concepts

A great deal of work has been done in the recent decade in order to categorize emotions.

No real systematic account of emotions has yet emerged but Johnson-Laird and Oatley (1989 in Ungerer and Schmid 1996:138-140) are two scholars within the subject of human cognition who have tried to distinguish between essential emotion words and more marginal emotion terms. They argue that speakers seem to think that some terms are more basic than others. For instance love, anger and happiness are seen in English as more basic emotion words than for example annoyance, rage and regret (Johnson- Laird & Oatley in Ungerer & Schmid 1996:138-140).

Basicness refers to two things within the category of emotional terms. Firstly, it means that the concept that corresponds to an emotional word belongs to the middle- level in a vertical hierarchy of concepts. This means that e.g. „anger‟ lies between the superordinate level and the subordinate level. On the superordinate level emotion would be placed and on the subordinate level we would put „annoyance‟ (Kövecses 2000:2-4).

This discussion is made clearer in Figure 1 below:

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Figure 1. Levels of emotion terms (based on Kövecses 2000:3)

Secondly, basicness refers to how prototypical an emotion category is. That is, many people regard „anger‟ as a better example of an emotion than „annoyance‟.

Psychologists and philosophers have tried to find a limited number of basic emotions.

Johnson-Laird and Oatley have come to the conclusion that “certain emotion terms are basic and unanalysable in the sense that they cannot be broken down into attributes or other even more basic emotions” (Johnson-Laird & Oately in Ungerer & Schmid 1996:138). Basic emotion terms are often used to describe less basic emotions.

Johnson-Laird and Oatley describe five basic negative emotions: sadness, anger, disgust/hate and fear. They also provide us with four positive basic emotions:

joy/happiness and desire/love. Double labels like disgust/hate signify that basic emotions can be seen as short-lived states (disgust) or dispositions (hate).

Table 1. Basic emotion terms (Johnson-Laird & Oatley 1989 in Ungerer & Schmid 1996: 139)

Negative emotions

Sadness Joy/Happiness Anger

Disgust/Hate Desire/Love Fear

Positive emotions

What distinguishes these basic emotions from other emotions is mainly the fact that

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the first names of emotions that children learn (Johnson-Laird & Oatley in Ungerer &

Schmid 1996:138-140). Wierzbecka (1999:49) is also of the opinion that emotion concepts have to be separated into different categories but she prefers another type of categorization. She has chosen to divide emotions into six groups:

1) Something good happened joy, happiness 2) Something bad happened sadness, grief

3) Something bad can/will happen fear, anxiety

4) I don‟t want things like this to happen anger, indignation 5) Thinking about other people envy

6) Thinking about ourselves shame, remorse

Wierzbecka argues that all emotions can fit into any of these six groups. Since this paper aims at explaining the differences between the less basic emotions terrified, horrified and petrified the focus is on Wierzbecka‟s third category “something bad can/will happen”.

It is worth noticing that Wierzbecka only mentions fear relating to the future.

According to her opinion we do not feel fear about things that have already happened in the past. She argues that terrified, petrified and horrified are emotions related to fear of something that is about to happen. These emotion words, however, are much stronger in their meanings than e.g. „fear‟ or „afraid‟ are. A person who is terrified, petrified or horrified is afraid that something „very bad‟ is going to/can happen (Wierzbecka 1999:75-76).

2.3 The problematic distinction between literal meaning and non-literal meaning When studying the meaning of words it is important to distinguish between literal and non-literal meaning. Although this study focuses on emotion adjectives petrified is included in the study since its non-literal meaning refers to a strong feeling of fear. Many people probably argue that petrified rather refers to a state of being hard as a stone and not an emotion. However, in this study both the literal and the non-literal meaning of petrified are included.

Cruse (2004: 195-197) explains that people seem to think that literal meaning is the first meaning of a word that springs to mind when reading or hearing a word. However, people can have different views on what the literal meaning of a word is. Cruse himself

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argues that „expire‟ to him carries the literal meaning „die‟ whereas to his students

„expire‟ carries the literal meaning „come to the end of a period of validity‟. In the same way some people think that petrified carries the literal meaning „a feeling of fear‟ while others consider petrified as „being hard as a stone‟.

In dictionaries, the most frequent reading of a word is usually written first but this might not always be the literal meaning. Cruse uses the verb „see‟ as an example. For most people the literal meaning of „see‟ is to „have a visual experience‟ but in contrast

„see‟ is most frequently used as referring to „understand‟. It seems that Cruse (2004:195- 197) is of the opinion that there is no literal meaning or that literal meanings differ greatly depending on person and age since meanings might change over time and also because many expressions that originally were used as metaphors have changed in meaning (Cruse 2004:195-197). „Expire‟ probably meant „die‟ to begin with but since it has been used more and more frequently in sentences such as „my driving license has expired‟ the word has gradually acquired a different literal meaning, i.e. “come to the end of a validity”. This is also the case with „crane‟ which refers to both „a bird with very long legs‟ and „a tall machine used by builders for lifting heavy things‟ (LDOCE [www];

Lundmark 2006:14). To tell which meaning is the literal one is not always easy. When talking about emotions it is even more difficult to establish their literal meanings since emotional concepts are likely to differ between individuals. Although this study focuses on emotion adjectives both the literal meaning and the non literal meaning of petrified are referred to in the following pages.

3 Material and method

3.1 Material

What is important in order to draw accurate conclusions regarding the meanings of words is that the chosen corpora are large. Therefore, the primary data sources used in this paper are the two huge corpora, the BNC and the COCA.

The BNC contains 100 million words of modern BrE. In order to provide a wide collection of samples of written and spoken BrE it contains language from a great variety of sources, starting from the later part of the 20th century. The written part of

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academic books and popular fiction, published and unpublished letters, school and university essays, among many other kinds of text (BNC [www]).

The COCA contains approximately 385 million words derived from spoken language, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers and academic texts. The corpus is updated every six to nine months and serves as a great record of linguistic changes in AmE (COCA [www]).

3.1.1 Corpora, concordance and collocations

Since this study is based on the analysis of corpora it is essential that the most important aspects of corpus linguistics are made clear. First of all, it is important to know that a corpus consists of a selection of texts naturally occurring in a language. These texts are electronically stored in order to help us monitor and analyse language usage and the contextual meanings of words. A corpus normally contains millions of words and it is vital to have a large corpus in order to be able to analyze the structure of a language accurately (Kennedy 1998: 3-4).

Furthermore, a concordance is a list of word strings retrieved from a corpus. The concordance shows how often a particular word occurs and each word is still attached to the original text it belongs to. KWIC (Key Word in Context) is the most widely used concordance format. This format shows a line of text that can be used in order to analyse that words most frequently occur before and after a particular key word or node word (Kennedy 1998:247-251). The following text is an example of a concordance line retrieved from the BNC:

(1) easy for people to misunderstand religious language and ritual. There is a very strong tendency to take literally what needs imaginative interpretation. All the great religions affirm that at

Finally, some words have a tendency to occur in the company of other words. For instance, the word strong often occurs in the company of tendency, as demonstrated in the concordance line above (Kennedy 1998:108). It is crucial to have knowledge of collocations in order to create a correct sentence in a language.

Nevertheless, it is difficult to draw a line between what constitutes a collocation and what does not. For instance, it is debatable how many times a word must occur in the company of another word in order for these words to be accepted as collocates

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(Kennedy 1998:111). It is also debatable whether determiners, conjunctions and prepositions should be accepted as collocations. The frequency of “a/an terrified” and

“some terrified” is very common but these sets of words are not normally considered to be collocations.

3.2 Method

In order to answer the research questions a quantitative method was chosen. When doing corpus studies this is the most common approach since it involves analyses of how frequent certain words are. A strategic choice of investigating the occurrences of terrified, petrified and horrified in fiction and newspapers was made since it seems more likely that these words occur more frequently in these text types. An AmE corpus and a BrE corpus were chosen in order to be able to find out whether these words are used differently in these two varieties of English.

The COCA and the BNC were searched in order to collect data. After logging on to the corpus website the emotional adjective e.g. terrified was typed in the search box.

At POS LIST „all adjectives‟ was chosen in order only to get adjectives and no other word classes. After clicking on „charts‟ and „search‟, tables showing the frequency of the adjective were shown within the different subcorpora available. The focus was on the newspaper and fiction tables and on the number of frequencies calculated per million words.

In order to obtain lists of interesting collocations to analyse the emotional adjective and an asterisk was typed in the search box, e.g. terrified *. Under sections

„yes‟ was chosen in order to be able to see from which subcorpora each collocation came. The thirty most common collocations were put in tables and from those tables the most interesting collocations were selected based on which word class they belong to.

For instance, determiners, conjunctions and prepositions were not selected as they did not tell anything about the contextual differences between the adjectives. Instead nouns, verbs and adverbs were selected. Of this reason some of the tables in the result section only contain six or seven collocations while other tables contain many more collocations. After being put in tables the different collocations were analysed and compared.

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3.3 Limitations and problems

The biggest difficulty during this study was to decide what to accept as a collocation. In the appendix, the thirty words occurring in the company of the node words terrified, petrified and horrified are presented in tables. According to Kennedy (1998:108), some linguists argue that all these words are collocations, but as my personal interest was to find the difference in meaning between the chosen adjectives, this study focuses on words that intuitively are regarded as being collocations.

For this reason, the section about collocations mainly focuses on nouns and intensifiers as collocates of terrified, petrified and horrified. It was observed during the analyses that the possibility to find differences in meaning between the adjectives is greater when the focus is on nouns, verbs and intensifiers rather than prepositions and determiners. This means that words such as the, not, a/an, of were not studied. Neither were collocations where terrified, petrified or horrified were used as verbs e.g. terrified him rather than adjectives. Nouns are interesting to analyse since adjectives can be attributes to nouns and thus add information about the noun. However, adjectives can have a predicative function as well e.g. “he is horrified”. Additionally, intensifiers are interesting to study since they add degree and intensity to the adjective, such as absolutely in “absolutely terrified”.

This study focuses on the left-hand and the right-hand collocates of terrified, petrified and horrified. It would have been interesting to focus on collocates occurring further away from the node adjectives, i.e. context words, but for lack of time this was not possible.

Furthermore, in the tables a column showing the frequencies of the collocations in the whole corpus was included. However, a thorough analysis of this did not fit within the boundaries of this paper.

4 Results

In this section the results of the corpus investigation are presented by means of several tables. The study begins by an analysis of the frequencies of terrified, petrified and horrified. Each emotion adjective is analysed and exemplified in a separate section before they are compared. After frequency, collocations and differences in meanings are discussed.

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4.1 Frequency 4.1.1 Terrified

Table 2 below shows the frequency of terrified in AmE and BrE within the subcorpora fiction and newspaper. All figures in Table 2 show the frequency per million words, meaning for example that out of a million words terrified occurs 29.5 times in BrE fiction.

Table 2. The frequencies of terrified in BrE and AmE fiction and newspaper

Subcorpora BrE AmE

Fiction 29.5 29.8

Newspaper 18.7 5.6

As can be seen, terrified is used more often in fiction than in newspapers. Example (2) was found in an AmE newspaper whereas example (3) was found in AmE fiction.

(2) terrified tourists and residents fled the second bombing, (3) It hisses with a terrified breath full of wild fear.

Generally, emotions occur more frequently in fiction than in other text types. What is most noteworthy in Table 2 is that the occurrences of terrified in AmE newspapers are much lower than the occurrences of terrified in BrE newspapers. This is remarkable since the use of terrified in fiction is as common in both varieties of English. When looking closer at the topics and headings of the newspaper articles in the COCA and the BNC no clue was found to why terrified is much more frequent in BrE newspapers compared to AmE newspapers. Example (4) below is an extract from AmE newspapers while example (5) is taken from a BrE newspaper.

(4) reports of rape and murder terrified America in the initial hours following the storm

(5) A terrified woman driver fled across six lanes of a motorway after a man tried to grab her

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Since no difference in the use of terrified was found between AmE newspapers and BrE newspapers it might be the case that another emotion adjective for fear is used to express fear in AmE newspapers. However, such a synonym was not found in this study. As the following pages will show neither petrified nor horrified were frequently used in US newspapers. Alternatively, it might be a question of formality between AmE and BrE if the use of emotion words in US newspapers is much lower compared to BrE newspapers. That would indicate that AmE is more formal since they use less emotion words. However, more studies must be conducted before this hypothesis can be confirmed.

4.1.2 Petrified

Table 3 below shows the occurrences per million words of petrified in AmE and BrE within the subcorpora fiction and newspaper.

Table 3. The frequencies of petrified in BrE and AmE fiction and newspaper

Subcorpora BrE AmE

Fiction 3.7 3.4

Newspaper 1.7 1.3

Table 3 shows that the emotion adjective petrified is used very rarely in both AmE and BrE. We can also see that petrified is used more in fiction than in newspapers in the same way as terrified is. In Table 3, however, the frequencies of the word petrified seem to be similar in both varieties of English. That is to say, petrified is used approximately as frequently in both varieties of English in the subcorpora fiction and newspaper. Even though the number of occurrences of petrified is somewhat higher in BrE, no conclusions can be drawn on petrified being used more frequently in BrE since the numbers differ so little. Examples (6) and (7) below show how petrified is used in BrE fiction (6) and in AmE newspapers (7). As one can see, petrified carries two different meanings, which are discussed in Sections 4.2 and 4.3.2

(6) the latest shapes in petrified wood adorning the mantelpieces (7) After the accident, he's petrified to go on the school bus

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4.1.3 Horrified

Table 4 below shows the frequencies of horrified in AmE and BrE in the genres fiction and newspapers.

Table 4. The frequencies of horrified in BrE and AmE fiction and newspaper

Subcorpora BrE AmE

Fiction 18.8 12.5

Newspaper 13.1 4.0

Out of one million words horrified is used 18.8 times in BrE fiction and 12.5 times in AmE fiction. Horrified is used less often in newspapers just like terrified and petrified are. However, the frequency of horrified in newspapers is considerably higher in BrE than in AmE. Out of one million words in the newspaper subcorpus there are 13.1 occurrences of horrified in BrE, while there are only 4.0 occurrences of horrified in AmE. Horrified is, in both genres, more common in BrE than in AmE.

Concordance line (8) below is an example from AmE newspapers while concordance line (9) is an example from BrE fiction.

(8) the world was horrified by photographic images of Iraqi detainees being tortured and humiliated by American soldiers

(9) She stopped, horrified at what she had been about to say

4.1.4 Comparisons of the frequencies of terrified, petrified and horrified

Terrfied is the adjective out of these three that is more commonly used in both AmE and BrE both in fiction and in newspapers. In AmE terrified is used much more often than petrified and horrified. Furthermore, the data show that none of these emotion adjectives are used frequently in AmE newspapers. There is a chance that emotional adjectives are less used in AmE newspapers than they are in BrE newspapers, or alternatively they use other words than terrified, petrified and horrified for describing fear in AmE newspapers. Generally, all three adjectives are more frequently used in BrE and petrified is the least used one in both varieties of English.

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4.2 Collocations

In this section the left -and right-hand collocates of terrified, petrified and horrified are presented and analysed. Collocates are the words surrounding the node words i.e.

terrified, petrified and horrified. Collocation is the set of words containing both the node word and the left- or right-hand collocate. Thus, absolutely terrified is a collocation whereas absolutely is a left-hand collocate of terrified.

When compiling the collocations, the frequencies of the collocations in the whole corpus were included also, in order to show the overall frequency of the collocations. It is interesting to see how common a collocation is in fiction and newspaper and then compare to how common it is generally, in the whole corpus. All figures in the following tables show the frequency per million words.

As most adjectives, terrified, petrified and horrified carry two grammatical functions; one attributive function and one predicative function. When the node adjective occurs to the left of the collocate the adjective has an attributive function as in example (10) below. When the adjective has an attributive function the adjective is usually preceding the noun which it modifies (Estling Vannestål 2007:220).

(10) Mack sees his own terrified face staring back from the mirror

In contrast the adjective has a predicative function when it describes either the subject or the object (Estling Vannestål 2007:220) as in examples (11) below.

(11) The hitchhiker looks petrified.

Tables 5 and 6 below show the most common right-hand collocates of terrified in AmE and BrE.

Table 5. Right-hand collocates of terrified in AmE

Collocates Fiction Newspaper The whole corpus

Terrified eyes 18 1 22

Terrified young 11 2 21

Terrified face 16 0 20

Terrified people 2 7 18

Terrified look 8 1 11

Terrified scream 8 0 10

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Table 6. Right-hand collocates of terrified in BrE

Collocations Fiction Newspaper The whole corpus

Terrified woman 1 6 7

Terrified children 2 3 6

Terrified child 5 0 5

Terrified horse 4 0 4

Terrified horses 3 0 3

Terrified glance 3 0 3

When comparing Tables 5 and 6 above, we see that the most common collocation in both varieties of English is terrified eyes with 22 occurrences in the whole COCA and 11 occurrences in the whole BNC. Another collocation that is common in both varieties of English is terrified face. Both of these collocations occur mainly in fiction. Also terrified look and terrified glance are common collocations and these sets of words are closely connected to terrified face and terrified eyes since they all refer to someone looking terrified. Example (12) below is taken from AmE fiction.

(12) seeing the last plea for mercy in the terrified eyes.

What is noteworthy is that terrified woman is common in BrE newspapers while terrified people is more common in AmE newspapers. Possibly, it can be assumed that AmE tend to be more gender-neutral. On the other hand, it might be the case that newspapers in the US do not write about things that happen to single individuals but rather write about big events affecting more people and thus more often write terrified people rather than terrified woman. The US is after all a much larger country than the UK, with many more crimes happening every day. However, it is peculiar that terrified man is not a common collocation in BrE while terrified woman is.

(13) A terrified woman handed over cash after being threatened with an

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(14) Terrified children were led outside in their costumes away from the poisonous fumes.

(15) Hundreds of terrified people waiting to hear Mandela ran for cover as police fired blasts of shotgun pellets.

Even though terrified women was not among the thirty most common collocations in either variety of English it was more common than the use of terrified men. Women are thus, more terrified than men are in AmE and BrE and it can be assumed that women are more often victims of crime. However, these are only speculations so far.

It is also noteworthy that terrified young is more common in AmE newspapers while terrified children is more common in BrE newspapers. Young carries a vaguer meaning than children since young includes both teenagers and children. This is probably the reason for why the occurrences of terrified young are much higher than the occurrences of children are in all subcorpora. In AmE terrified young occurs 21 times in all subcorpora while terrified children occurs six times in all subcorpora in BrE.

Furthermore, it is a bit surprising that terrified horse and terrified horses are such common collocations in BrE fiction. Examples (16) and (17) below were retrieved from BrE fiction. The first concordance line in (16) is a good example of how terrified horse is used as a simile in order to compare the sudden movement of the land to the behaviour of a terrified horse.

(16) The land bucked and heaved like a terrified horse

(17) there was always more chaos from the terrified horses than from the loss of men.

Tables 7 and 8 below show the most common left-hand collocates of terrified in AmE and BrE. The figures show the occurrences per million words.

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Table 7. Left-hand collocates of terrified in AmE

Collocations Fiction Newspaper The whole

corpus

so terrified 34 12 101

too terrified 27 6 45

absolutely terrified 10 5 37

looked terrified 30 1 32

more terrified 14 1 27

just terrified 3 2 25

really terrified 4 3 19

still terrified 9 0 19

suddenly terrified 14 0 18

looks terrified 13 2 17

Table 8. Left-hand collocates of terrified in BrE

corpus

obviously terrified 4 0 6

clearly terrified 2 0 5

always terrified 1 0 4

There are no big differences between the word-classes which appear as left-hand collocates of terrified in AmE and BrE. Absolutely, just, looked, more, still, so and too

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left-hand collocates, except looked, are adverbs adding degree and intensity to the node adjective.

Nevertheless, there are big differences between how often these collocations occur in AmE and BrE. For instance, so terrified occurs 34 times in AmE fiction and 12 times in AmE newspapers but only 11 times in BrE fiction and 3 times in BrE newspapers.

Examples (18) and (19) below show how terrified can be used. Example (18) was taken from BrE while (19) was taken from AmE.

(18) The sight of Ronald Reagan on television clearly terrified the Boll Weevils and the Democratic leadership

(19) " We are really terrified and living in horror, " he said.

Below are two tables presenting the most common collocates appearing before petrified.

Table 9 presents the AmE collocations whereas Table 10 shows the BrE collocations.

Table 9. Right-hand collocates of petrified in AmE

Petrified forest 12 14 65

Petrified wood 23 12 50

Petrified man 0 1 14

Petrified gardens 1 0 12

Petrified men 0 0 6

Petrified sand 0 1 5

Petrified trees 0 0 4

Petrified forests 3 0 3

Petrified birds 1 0 2

Petrified bones 0 0 2

Petrified bread 0 1 2

Petrified coral 1 0 2

Petrified lava 2 0 2

Petrified life 0 0 2

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Table 10. Right-hand collocates of petrified in BrE

Petrified lump 0 0 2

Petrified zoo 0 0 1

Petrified whirlpool 1 0 1

Petrified monster 1 0 1

Petrified Marxism 0 0 1

Petrified tree 1 0 1

Petrified trawler 1 0 1

Petrified toddler 0 0 1

Petrified state 0 0 1

Petrified spaghetti 0 0 1

Petrified silence 0 0 1

It is clear that petrified carries a different meaning than terrified due to the different collocations we get from the tables above. Petrified is commonly used with uncountable nouns such as forest, tree and wood. In this company petrified refers to something that has died and changed into stone. Most of the AmE and BrE collocations refer to something that has turned into stone or something that is unable to move. However, if prepositions would have been included in the collocations studied in this paper, then more instances with the non-literal meaning of petrified would have been found. The sentence below is an example of how the non-literal meaning of petrified is used.

(20) She is absolutely petrified of that cat.

The non-literal meaning of petrified is thus to be so afraid of something that you are unable to move. When talking about petrified forest and petrified wood people refer to the literal meaning of petrified. As discussed in Section 2, people tend to have different

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As Table 10 shows, two of the collocations found are much more common in AmE than in BrE. Petrified forest and petrified wood occurs many more times in AmE compared to BrE. However, in the US there are some large national parks with petrified woods and petrified forest while there are no such parks in the UK. For instance in Arizona in the US there is a famous park called the petrified forest. It seems reasonable to argue that this provides some explanation for the high number of occurrences of petrified forest in AmE compared to the low number in BrE.

Tables 11 and 12 below show the most frequent left-hand collocations of petrified in AmE and BrE.

Table 11. Left-hand collocates of petrified in AmE

Corpus

absolutely petrified 5 3 14

like petrified 3 0 7

so petrified 0 1 5

just petrified 0 0 4

looks petrified 4 0 4

totally petrified 1 0 3

freaking petrified 2 0 2

completely petrified 1 0 2

bit petrified 0 0 2

giant petrified 1 0 2

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Table 12. Left-hand collocates of petrified in BrE

Corpus

always petrified 0 0 2

almost petrified 2 0 2

stood petrified 1 0 2

still petrified 1 0 2

so petrified 1 0 2

totally petrified 1 0 1

justifiable petrified 0 0 1

just petrified 0 0 1

sitting petrified 0 1 1

There are no big differences between the word-classes appearing as left-hand collocates of petrified in AmE and BrE. The adverbs and intensifiers absolutely, like, too, so, just and totally are common in both varieties. In BrE stood petrified and sitting petrified are relatively common collocations. They both refer to the non-literal meaning of petrified since they refer to being very still. Looks petrified was obtained from AmE and also this collocation refers to the non-literal meaning of petrified. Looks, stood and sitting are all verbs and it seems as if the non-literal meaning of petrified always appears when the left-hand collocate of petrified is a verb, thus when petrified is used predicatively.

(21) For just a few seconds she stood petrified

(22) David Roberts sitting petrified but unhurt in the wreckage.

Table 13 and 14 below show the most common collocates appearing before horrified in AmE and BrE.

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Table 13. Right-hand collocates of horrified in AmE

Horrified look 0 3 25

Horrified face 13 0 13

Horrified fascination 7 1 10

Horrified expression 6 0 8

Horrified disbelief 6 1 7

Horrified faces 5 0 6

Horrified looks 5 0 6

Horrified eyes 5 0 5

Horrified gasp 4 0 5

Horrified mother 0 2 5

Horrified reaction 1 0 5

Table 14. Right-hand collocates of horrified in BrE

Collocations Fiction Newspaper The whole Corpus

Horrified fascination 14 0 16

Horrified disbelief 5 1 7

Horrified face 6 0 7

Horrified eyes 6 0 7

Horrified silence 7 0 7

Horrified expression 5 0 5

Horrified look 4 0 4

Horrified reaction 2 0 4

Horrified mother 0 2 3

Horrified glance 3 0 3

Horrified cry 3 0 3

Horrified comprehension

2 0 2

Horrified gaze 2 0 2

Horrified interest 2 0 2

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Table 14 shows that look, face, fascination, expression, disbelief, eyes and mother are examples of nouns that frequently appear before horrified i.e. when horrified has an attributive function.

In AmE horrified look occurs 25 times per million words but it never occurs in fiction and only three times in newspapers. However, in BrE horrified look only occurs in fiction and never in another genre. Horrified face, on the other hand, only occurs in fiction and in no other subcorpora in AmE. Thus, horrified look is not used in AmE fiction while horrified face is.

It is noteworthy that horrified mother is more common in newspapers than in fiction. This is not very surprising since newspapers are more eager to sell many copies everyday and they tend to use a more straightforward and sensational language in order to attract readers.

(23) One itemised phone bill to Bedworth's horrified mother ran to 34 pages of listed calls, the jury heard.

Tables 15 and 16 below show the most frequent left-hand collocates of horrified in AmE and BrE.

Table 15. Left-hand collocates of horrified in AmE

Corpus

so horrified 13 2 32

looked horrified 5 12 26

Absolutely horrified 2 3 14

looks horrified 10 1 13

just horrified 0 0 10

really horrified 2 0 8

too horrified 8 0 8

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Table 16. Left-hand collocates of horrified in BrE

Corpus

so horrified 4 1 12

looked horrified 7 0 12

absolutely horrified 2 1 10

utterly horrified 1 2 5

rather horrified 3 0 3

almost horrified 2 0 2

apparently horrified 1 0 2

clearly horrified 1 0 2

There are no big differences among the collocates occurring on the left side of horrified when looking only at the word-classes. So, looked and absolutely are frequently used before horrified in both varieties of English. However, when looking at the frequency of the collocations there are clear differences. For instance, looked horrified seems more common in AmE newspapers than in AmE fiction. When comparing these numbers to the frequency among the subcorpora in BrE it is obvious that looked horrified is used differently in BrE. In BrE, looked horrified is most frequently used in fiction and it is never used in newspapers. This also corresponds to the findings among the right-hand collocates of horrified, since horrified look never occurred in AmE fiction but occurred a few times in AmE newspapers. In BrE neither horrified look nor looked horrified occur in newspapers while they do occur in fiction.

What is more, so horrified occurs four times per million words in BrE and 13 times in AmE fiction. Generally, i.e. in all subcorpora, so horrified occurs 12 times in BrE and 32 times in AmE. Thus, so horrified is more common in AmE than in BrE.

4.2.1 Comparison of the collocations of terrified, petrified and horrified

Terrified and horrified are surrounded by similar words in both varieties of English.

Terrified eyes, horrified eyes, terrified face, horrified face and terrified look, horrified look are used frequently in both AmE and BrE. They are especially common in fiction.

In AmE newspapers terrified people tend to be more frequent than terrified woman and

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terrified children which are common in BrE newspapers. This might be caused by a stronger will to use a more thrilling and shocking language in BrE newspapers.

Horrified seems to carry some difference in meaning when we compare the words occurring with horrified and terrified. In both varieties of English, horrified is used attributively with nouns such as fascination, disbelief, expression, and reaction. In other words, it is more common to say in both AmE and BrE e.g. horrified reaction or horrified expression rather than terrified reaction or terrified expression. It is also interesting that horrified mother is more common than terrified mother while terrified woman is more common than horrified woman.

From the words occurring in the company of petrified it is clear that petrified carries a more specific meaning than terrified and horrified do. Petrified is, in both varieties of English, habitually used attributively together with nouns such as tree, forest and wood while terrified and horrified are not. Petrified does carry a similar meaning to terrified and horrified but petrified additionally refers to something that has died and changed into stone. The literal meaning of petrified is to have died and changed into stone while the non-literal meaning is to be so afraid that you are paralyzed and cannot move.

When looking at the words to the left of terrified, petrified and horrified we can see that many intensifiers such as so, absolutely, just and looks are very common among all of the adjectives. However, too is not frequently used with petrified in either AmE or BrE, while it is frequently used with the two other adjectives.

The intensifier really is more frequent together with these adjectives in AmE than it is in BrE. In BrE, however, clearly is more frequent than it is in AmE.

(24) Now Jeralyn was really horrified. (AmE) (25) this person clearly terrified this woman. (BrE)

4.3 Difference in meaning

It seems obvious that in order to understand what for instance terrified is, one must know what the basic emotion fear is. In Section 2.2 different ideas on how to categorize emotions were presented and it was explained that fear belongs to the basic

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plausible to argue that also terrified, petrified and horrified belong to the subordinate level under fear. However, terrified, petrified and horrified refer to something worse than just fear and it seems necessary to come up with more categories than the ones that were presented in Section 2.2 in order to separate for instance petrified from worried.

4.3.1 Terrified

The literal meaning of terrified is according to the LDOCE [www] to be “very frightened”. Below is one example of terrified, extracted from an AmE newspaper.

(26) Ford is terrified of losing his superstar touch.

4.3.2 Petrified

The meaning of petrified is according to the LDOCE [www] to be “extremely frightened, especially so frightened that you cannot move or think”. However, if petrified occurs in the company of trees or wood, the LDOCE explains that it means “wood, trees etc., that have changed into stone over a long period of time”. When the different collocations, presented in Section 4.2, were compared it was clear that petrified carries a different literal-meaning from terrified and horrified. Petrified means that something has died and changed into stone but non-literally it means that one is so afraid that one is paralysed.

Below is an example of a concordance line showing that petrified carries a different literal meaning from terrified and horrified.

(27) Slivers of black burnt onion, petrified bacon rinds, lacy brown scraps of fried eggs.

4.3.3 Horrified

According to the LDOCE [www] the literal meaning of horrified is that you “feel very shocked and afraid or upset”. In Section 4.2, it was found that horrified is used frequently with nouns such as expression, disbelief and reaction.

When studying the collocations and some concordances with horrified, it seems as if the difference between terrified and horrified is that horrified refers to being shocked and upset whereas terrified does not seem to do so. The sentence below makes the meaning of horrified a bit clearer.

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(28) The price of a full season ticket was going to be as much as a term's school fees, and when I saw my father's horrified face, I said, "I can cycle."

In Section 4.2 where collocations were analysed, it was interesting to discover that horrified mother was more frequent than terrified mother. The reason why this is the case might be because children have a tendency of not only frightening their mothers but also shocking them and making them upset. Extract (29) below shows an example of this.

(29) convinced his horrified mother, who wanted him to be a preacher, that acting was only a stopgap measure until he became a writer.

5 Conclusion

Four research questions were addressed in Section 1.1 in order to fulfil the aim of this study, which was to explore the meanings of the adjectives terrified, petrified and horrified. In this section the answer to the research questions are discussed.

First of all it became clear during this study that out of the three adjectives that have been studied, terrified is most frequently used in both AmE and BrE. The meaning of terrified is less specific than the meanings of petrified and horrified and that is probably the reason why terrified is more frequently used. Terrified means to be very frightened, whereas horrified means that one, in addition to being very afraid, is also shocked and upset. Petrified, on the other hand, means that one is so extremely afraid that one is unable to move or think. The adjective that was least used in AmE and BrE was petrified. The reason why petrified is least used might be since its meaning is more specific than the meanings of terrified and horrified are. Petrified carries two different meanings. The literal meaning is to be hard like stone, while the non-literal meaning is to be so frightened that one cannot move. Consequently, it seems unreasonable to argue that petrified is a near- synonym to terrified and horrified. Furthermore, if one were to put terrified, petrified and horrified on a scale of degree, depending on how frightened someone is, it seems correct to

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she is paralyzed. In contrast, it is difficult to know where to place horrified and terrified on such a scale. Even though we know that horrified additionally refers to being shocked it is difficult to distinguish the degree of fright between horrified and terrified. Consequently, it seems plausible to argue that terrified and horrified can be considered as near-synonyms.

What is more, terrified, petrified and horrified most often collocate with nouns and adverbs. The most frequent adverbs that were used in the company of terrified, petrified and horrified were absolutely, so and just. The most frequent nouns occurring in the company of these adjectives were eyes, face, and look. However, these nouns were not very frequent in the company of petrified. Instead uncountable nouns such as wood and forest are more frequent. In these cases petrified means that something has turned into stone over a very long period of time.

It is obvious that the meaning of horrified differs from the meaning of terrified and petrified, when collocations and concordance lines are studied. Since horrified often occurs attributively, i.e. to the left of nouns such as reaction, disbelief and fascination it became clear that horrified refers to being upset and shocked as well as very frightened.

Furthermore, all adjectives tend to occur with the same kind of word-classes in both varieties of English. However, some differences regarding the intensifiers were found. For instance, really is more commonly used in AmE while clearly is more frequent in BrE.

In addition, some general conclusions can be drawn regarding the usage of terrified, petrified and horrified. Firstly, all of these emotion adjectives are more frequent per million words in BrE than in AmE and secondly, they are more frequent in fiction than in newspapers.

The results of the present research are significant since they explain the difference between three adjectives that according to many people seem to represent the same emotion. It is important to know the difference between near-synonyms if one wants to create idiomatically correct sentences in a language. Native speakers normally have an instinct telling them which word to use in a specific context but for non-native speakers the difference between these words must be explained to avoid mistakes and misunderstandings.

Many suggestions for further research can be made since there are many synonyms that need to be investigated in order to provide better understandings of the contextual differences between these words. However, in connection with the emotion adjectives which are investigated in this paper it would be interesting to explore the meanings of other similar adjectives such as appalled, frightened and scared. It would also be

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interesting to see how the results would differ if prepositions would have been counted as collocates.

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References Primary sources

British National Corpus, http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/x.asp. Accessed on 2 April, 2009.

Corpus of Contemporary American English, http://www.americancorpus.org/. Accessed on 2 April, 2009.

Secondary sources

British National Corpus, http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/corpus/index.xml. Accessed on 16 March, 2009.

Caffi, C, & Janney, R.W. 1994. Toward a Pragmatics of emotive communication. Journal of Pragmatics: an interdisciplinary quarterly of language studies. 22:325-373.

Cruse, Alan. 2004. Meaning in Language – anIintroduction to Semantics and Pragmatics.

Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Estling Vannestål, Maria. 2007. A University grammar - with a Swedish perspective. Lund:

Studentlitteratur.

Kennedy, Graeme. 1998. An Introduction to Corpus Linguistics. Harlow: Addison Wesley Longman Limited.

Kövecses, Zoltan. 2000. Metaphor and Emotion – Language, Culture and Body in Human Feeling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, http://www.ldoceonline.com/. Accessed on 20 March, 2009.

Lundmark, Angelica. 2006. Verbs in the Domain of Transactions: a Lexical and Semantic Study of Borrowing and Lending. Luleå: Luleå University of Technology.

Ungerer, Friedrich & Schmid, Hans-Jörg. 1996. An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics.

Harlow: Pearson Education Limited.

Wierzbecka, Anna. 1999. Emotions across Languages and Cultures – Diversity and Universals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Appendix

Table 1. Words on the first to the right of terrified in AmE

Table 2. Words on the first to the right of terrified in BrE

Corpus

Terrified of 85 30 204

Collocates Fiction Newspaper The whole

corpus

Terrified of 261 87 664

Terrified that 86 21 210

Terrified by 58 19 156

Terrified and 67 140 140

Terrified to 59 19 132

Terrified me 40 10 71

Terrified her 46 3 57

Terrified him 39 2 56

Terrified at 15 6 49

Terrified the 15 8 42

Terrified about 5 5 35

Terrified for 16 3 33

Terrified as 21 1 30

Terrified he 16 6 29

Terrified when 4 7 22

Terrified I 12 2 21

Terrified young 11 2 21

Terrified because 2 2 18

Terrified people 2 7 18

Terrified they 5 2 18

Terrified in 8 1 17

Terrified she 10 3 15

Terrified them 9 0 15

Terrified or 4 0 12

Terrified look 8 1 11

Terrified but 7 0 10

Terrified if 3 0 10

Terrified scream 8 0 10

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Terrified and 19 2 31

Terrified at 8 2 21

Terrified the 8 2 20

Terrified me 6 0 17

Terrified her 14 1 16

Terrified when 4 3 13

Terrified she 9 1 11

Terrified he 8 1 11

Terrified as 3 1 7

Terrified woman 1 6 7

Terrified children 2 3 6

Terrified out of 4 0 6

Terrified them 2 0 6

Terrified child 5 0 5

Terrified but 0 2 5

Terrified about 1 1 4

Terrified I 0 0 4

Terrified in 1 0 4

Terrified him 4 0 4

Terrified horse 4 0 4

Terrified they 1 1 4

Terrified horses 3 0 3

Terrified in case 1 0 3

Terrified glance 3 0 3

Table 3. Words on the first to the left of terrified in AmE

Corpus

was terrified 290 61 639

and terrified 115 18 207

the terrified 120 15 188

are terrified 21 27 161

is terrified 87 11 154

were terrified 37 24 148

be terrified 39 14 98

been terrified 48 10 80

am terrified 19 15 48

of terrified 14 13 42

it terrified 24 3 41

that terrified 19 5 40

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her terrified 21 1 27

how terrified 14 2 27

being terrified 9 4 25

had terrified 19 0 22

as terrified 13 1 21

with terrified 14 0 20

really terrified 4 3 19

suddenly terrified 14 0 18

but terrified 7 3 17

looks terrified 13 2 17

his terrified 12 0 16

Table 4. Words on the first to the left of terrified in BrE

Corpus

was terrified 81 30 184

and terrified 22 7 44

the terrified 21 15 44

been terrified 20 4 33

is terrified 4 6 31

were terrified 10 9 31

be terrified 6 5 30

are terrified 2 10 25

being terrified 4 3 10

his terrified 6 3 10

of terrified 6 1 10

it terrified 6 0 9

have terrified 6 1 8

their terrified 2 3 7

obviously terrified 4 0 6

clearly terrified 2 0 5

all terrified 3 1 5

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am terrified 0 0 4

always terrified 1 0 4

not terrified 1 0 4

Table 5. Words on the first to the right of petrified in AmE

Corpus

Petrified of 4 5 31

Petrified man 0 1 14

Petrified by 3 1 13

Petrified gardens 1 0 12

Petrified and 5 2 12

Petrified that 3 2 12

Petrified at 5 1 10

Petrified in 3 1 7

Petrified to 5 1 7

Petrified with 3 0 7

Petrified about 0 3 6

Petrified men 0 0 6

Petrified sand 0 1 5

Petrified the 2 1 4

Petrified when 2 0 4

Petrified into 0 0 3

Petrified I 1 1 3

Petrified forests 3 0 3

Petrified as 1 0 2

Petrified birds 1 0 2

Petrified beyond 1 1 2

Petrified bones 0 0 2

Petrified bread 0 1 2

Petrified for 0 1 2

Petrified coral 1 0 2

Petrified lava 2 0 2

Petrified life 0 0 2

Table 6. Words on the first to the right of petrified in BrE

Corpus

Petrified of 2 2 19

Petrified with 4 0 9

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Petrified when 2 1 4

Petrified in 0 0 3

Petrified by 1 1 3

Petrified and 1 0 3

Petrified at 1 0 2

Petrified I 0 0 2

Petrified lump 0 0 2

Petrified that 0 0 2

Petrified zoo 0 0 1

Petrified whirlpool 1 0 1

Petrified us 1 0 1

Petrified monster 1 0 1

Petrified me 0 0 1

Petrified Marxism 0 0 1

Petrified tree 1 0 1

Petrified trawler 1 0 1

Petrified toddler 0 0 1

Petrified to 1 0 1

Petrified they 0 0 1

Petrified them 1 0 1

Petrified the 0 0 1

Petrified than 0 0 1

Petrified state 0 0 1

Petrified spaghetti 0 0 1

Petrified silence 0 0 1

Table 7. Words on the first to the left of petrified in AmE

Corpus

the petrified 32 17 93

was petrified 19 14 69

of petrified 17 10 38

a petrified 15 2 33

and petrified 5 9 21

are petrified 4 2 15

is petrified 7 2 12

were petrified 2 2 11

be petrified 0 1 9

been petrified 2 0 6

at petrified 1 1 5

Emotion Adjectives: A corpus study of the use of terrified, petrified and horrified in British and American English

Emotion adjectives

A corpus study of the use of terrified, petrified and horrified in British and American English

Abstract

Table of Contents

1 Introduction

2 Theoretical background

3 Material and method

4 Results

5 Conclusion

References Primary sources

Secondary sources

Appendix