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Wierzbicka, Anna (1990). The semantics of emotions: Fear and its relatives in English. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 10(2), 359-375. DOI: 10.1080/07268609008599447

This paper demonstrates that emotion concepts – including the so-called basic ones, such as anger, sadness or fear – can be defined in terms of universal semantic primitives such as ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘do’, ‘happen’, ‘know’ and ‘want’, in terms of which all areas of meaning, in all languages, can be rigorously and revealingly portrayed.

The definitions proposed here differ in various respects from so-called ‘classical definitions’; in particular, they do not adhere to the Aristotelian model based on a ‘genus proximum’ and ‘differentia specifica’. Rather, they take the form of certain prototypical scripts or scenarios, formulated in terms of thoughts, ‘wants’ and feelings. These scripts, however, can be seen as formulas providing rigorous specifications of necessary and sufficient conditions, and they do not support the idea that emotion concepts are ‘fuzzy’. On the contrary, the small set of universal semantic primitives employed here allows us to show that even apparent synonyms such as afraid and scared embody different – and fully specifiable – conceptual structures, and to reveal the remarkable precision with which boundaries between concepts are drawn – even between those concepts which at first sight appear to be identical or only “stylistically” different. Upon closer investigation, human conceptualization of emotions reveals itself as a system of unconscious distinctions of incredible delicacy, subtlety, and precision.