CORPUS-BASED MODELING OF THE SEMANTIC FIELD OF JOY IN CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH

Abstract

The article proposes a practice-oriented corpus-based model for describing the semantic field of joy in contemporary English. The relevance of the study stems from the fact that positive emotions constitute one of the most frequent yet semantically dynamic segments of the English linguistic worldview: they are verbalized not only through direct nominations such as joy, happiness, delight, and pleasure, but also through numerous context-dependent units whose meanings vary in intensity, duration, evaluative charge, and causation. The aim of the article is to reconstruct the structure of the semantic field of joy on the basis of corpus data, to distinguish its core, near-core, and peripheral zones, to describe the typical patterns of collocability of the relevant units, and to clarify the discourse conditions of their functioning. The empirical base includes data from contemporary English corpora, dictionary definitions, and contexts drawn from different discourse types. The study combines continuous sampling, lexical-semantic modeling, contextual interpretation, selected elements of cognitive-metaphorical analysis, and corpus verification. The findings show that the semantic field of joy is hierarchically organized: its core consists of units with the most general meaning of positive emotional experience, whereas the near-core and peripheral zones represent nuances of intense delight, inner satisfaction, relief, gratitude, pride, and emotional uplift. Corpus evidence demonstrates that the boundaries between these zones are determined not abstractly but through actual collocability, recurrent syntactic patterns, repeated contexts, and discourse-specific uses. Joy in contemporary English is objectified as an inner state, an external manifestation, a positive evaluation of an event, and a resource for interpersonal interaction. The practical value of the study lies in the possibility of applying its results to corpus semantics, emotion studies, lexicography, discourse analysis, English language teaching, and the development of automated systems for recognizing emotionally marked speech.