SCALAR MEANING AND EVALUATIVE INTENSITY IN EMOTIONAL ENGAGEMENT: A STUDY OF INTEREST, PASSION, AND OBSESSION

Abstract

Emotional experience is frequently encoded in language through lexical items that express varying degrees of psychological involvement. This study investigates scalar meaning and evaluative intensity within the lexical field of emotional engagement, focusing on the expressions interest, passion, and obsession. Drawing on insights from Lexical Semantics and the theoretical principles of Scalar Semantics, the study explores how these lexical items function as gradable expressions representing increasing levels of emotional attachment. The analysis also considers the role of semantic prosody in shaping the evaluative interpretations associated with each term. Using qualitative semantic analysis, the study examines the conceptual relationships, evaluative meanings, and typical contextual associations of the three lexical items. The findings suggest that interest, passion, and obsession form a structured semantic continuum representing progressive degrees of emotional intensity. While interest denotes mild curiosity or engagement and is generally interpreted as neutral, passion reflects a stronger and positively valued emotional commitment. In contrast, obsession represents an extreme level of emotional attachment that often carries negative evaluative implications due to its association with excessive or compulsive behaviour. The study demonstrates that emotional lexical items are not isolated semantic units but are organized within graded structures that encode both conceptual intensity and social evaluation. By highlighting the interaction between scalar meaning and evaluative interpretation, this research contributes to ongoing discussions in lexical semantic theory concerning the representation of affective meaning in language. The study further underscores the importance of examining emotional vocabulary through scalar and evaluative frameworks in order to better understand how speakers linguistically conceptualize varying degrees of emotional engagement.