Adjectives expressing sadness in Swedish and English : A contrastive lexical analysis

Abstract: This study examines how Swedish and English adjectives relating to the semantic domain of SADNESS are used and what some of their semantic and syntactic characteristics are. The primary objectives of this study are to determine whether the adjectives in question are used more often attributively or predicatively, whether they are used more frequently along with the semantic role of stimulus or experiencer and whether there are any syntactic, semantic or lexical disparities in how Swedish and English encode the domain of SADNESS. To investigate this, parallel corpus data retrieved from movie and TV subtitles were analyzed in combination with dictionary data. The results showed that predicative usage was more dominant than attributive. While the semantic role of stimulus was more prevalent in the dataset of this study, experiencer-oriented adjectives showed higher prevalence when considering the individual frequencies of each word in the corpus. Notably, the Swedish word tråkig combines the meanings of `sad’ and ‘boring’, illustrating differences in emotion-related concept encoding between the two languages.