Idioms Used to Express Emotions

Abstract

The subject of our research are idioms which express emotions of happiness, surprise, sadness, anger, fear, disgust and shame. Research has shown that this type of idioms can be divided into three categories: idioms which have an emotion as its component, idioms which have a somatic component used to express emotions and idioms which express emotions through its context. It’s interesting that there is a higher number of idioms which denote negative emotions: sadness, fear and anger compared to idioms denoting positive emotions. The result of this research is that idioms are not only direct pictures of our emotions but also idioms with a somatic component represent bodily reactions which originate while experiencing certain emotion.