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

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.