Cognitive foundations of emotion verbs complementation in Croatian
Cognitive foundations of emotion verbs complementation in Croatian

Summary/Abstract: The paper looks into emotion verbs complementation in Croatian with the help of the methodological apparatus of Cognitive Grammar. The authors set off from the psychological research into categorization of human emotions (Shaver, Schwartz, Kirson & O’Connor 1987) which, next to the main division of emotions into positive and negative, proposes intensity and degree of their activation potential as basic categorization criteria. The authors try to make clear and unambiguous the connection between, on the one hand, highly schematic concepts based on the dynamics of spatial relations which unify specific case meanings (the concept of origin for the genitive, the concept of directedness for the dative, the concept of target for the accusative and the concept of parallelism for the instrumental), and case marking of emotion verb complements, on the other. In order to achieve that, they analyse and explain, in particular, the close connection between encyclopedic knowledge and the concept of origin, and the genitive marking of verb complements in examples such as stidjeti se koga/čega (to be ashamed of something/somebody). Furthermore, in the examples such as ponositi se kim/čim (to be proud of something/somebody) they establish the motivation for the instrumental coding of the complement in the correlation of different affective experiences with the scheme of parallelism. With the analysis of these and other examples the authors point out to the fact that case marking of verb complements in this group is semantically motivated, deeply rooted in the encyclopedic knowledge and everyday experiences, and thus, deeply connected with spatial concepts.

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