This paper addresses the issue of the historical development of for fear (that) in English – a prepositional subordinator ushering in fi nite clauses of purpose in which negation is inherently coded, i.e. the content of the subordinate clause is negated by the complementiser which does not contain a negative particle in itself. The rise of this construction is studied within the theory of grammaticalization and it turns out to be a regular case of grammaticalization following the mechanisms of grammaticalization such as desemanticisation, extension and decategorialisation.
Perception takes into account the costs and benefits of possible interpretations of incoming sensory data. This should be especially pertinent for threat recognition, where minimising the costs associated with missing a real threat is of primary importance. We tested whether recognition of threats has special characteristics that adapt this process to the task it fulfils. Participants were presented with images of threats and visually matched neutral stimuli, distorted by varying levels of noise. We found threat superiority effect and liberal response bias. Moreover, increasing the level of noise degraded the recognition of the neutral images to higher extent than the threatening images. To summarise, recognising threats is special, in that it is more resistant to noise and decline in stimulus quality, suggesting that threat recognition is a fast ‘all or nothing’ process, in which threat presence is either confirmed or negated.
The major underlying principle of the present paper is that, in opposition to the viewpoint of emotions as discrete entities, emotions are represented as clusters in conceptual space. The graded structure and fuzzy boundaries inherent in the prototype-periphery nature of these clusters dictate that the meaning of a specific emotion is governed by both inter- and intra-cluster relationships and their interactions. In addition to these relationships and interactions the paper examines both external and internal affects to compare and contrast the FEAR, COMPASSION, LOVE/JOY, and PRIDE clusters in British English and Polish. The three specific methods employed to analyze these are the GRID instrument, an online emotions sorting task, and a corpus-based cognitive linguistic methodology.