Hate and anger, love and desire: The construal of emotions in Homeric Greek

In Homeric Greek verbs that indicate negative emotions such as anger, hate, and envy take the NominativeDative construction, while verbs that indicate love, desire, and affection take the NominativeGenitive construction. The two constructions are typical of different verb classes: the former mainly occurs with verbs of social interaction, while the latter is mostly associated with verbs of hitting, touching, and striving. A further difference between the two groups of emotion verbs is that only verbs that indicate negative feelings are used in the imperative and co-occur with cause expressions. We argue that the extension of either construction to verbs of emotion accounts for different construals: while situations of anger, hate and envy are construed as interactive, with an agent that initiates an event and a second participant that may react, love and desire are construed as uncontrolled and not interactive.