The lexicon of emotion in the neo-Latin languages

This article represents the conclusion of a wide-ranging European project concerning the lexical structure of emotion in the neo-Latin languages: Italian, French, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese and Romanian. Intended to bring to light common features in these languages, as well as any peculiarities, the research project selected representative samples of emotional terms from the dictionaries of the six languages studied and analysed the similarity between these words using Scaling procedures. The graphic outputs of the Scaling procedures appear to organize the neo-Latin emotion lexicons in respect of three major dimensions that are similar to those already found in other languages: ‘hedonic value’, ‘potency’ and ‘physiological activation’. Interesting peculiarities emerged in relation to the salience of the dimensions, mainly for Romanian and Portuguese.