Corpus-based analysis of idioms describing emotions in British and American English

Abstract

This bachelor’s thesis aims to analyse idioms describing three basic emotions – happiness, sadness, and anger – in the British and American varieties of English using Corpus of Contemporary American English and British National Corpus for frequency counts. Idioms make language colourful and vivid. Idioms are frequently used to express emotions. However, learning and understanding idioms can be difficult. Furthermore, materials, such as textbooks and idiom dictionaries can often contain idioms that are not frequently used, making the studying of said idioms impractical. The findings of the thesis at hand show which emotion idioms are used frequently and which are not.