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Post by Somak Meitei on Oct 22, 2014 12:08:01 GMT 5.5
Which one is our best choice--adjective or noun whenever we have the time of using them with 'feel' in a sentence? Sometimes I found it is used with adjective, and sometimes with noun. To clarify my point, some examples are given: I feel sympathy..., I feel sympathetic..., I feel worry...., I feel worried.... Are both possible without oddness? If not, please help me
with their grammatical usages,especiall when used with 'feel'.
Thanks
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Post by Thoithoi O'Cottage on Oct 22, 2014 17:51:41 GMT 5.5
In "feel + noun," the noun is the object of the verb "feel."
In "feel + adjective," the adjective is a subject complement.
Thus,
1. (a) You feel sad. [You are sad.]
(b) You feel sadness. [You have/experience the feeling, that is, sadness.]
2. (a) You feel sorrowful.
(b) You feel sorrow.
If the context does not provide the details, it feels (or it seems to me) like the construction with adjectives expresses a feeling closer to you, while in the noun construction, it seems like you experience that feeling.
The two constructions have their own, distinct significances and in a context you may want to use one vonstruction while you want the other in another context, meaning that you don't want to use them interchangeably.
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Post by Thoithoi O'Cottage on Oct 23, 2014 11:09:41 GMT 5.5
One may ask, "Well, isn't being or feeling sad experiencing an emotion of sadness?"
Yes, it is. The meaning is roughly the same, but there is at least a significant difference in significance. Even when we don't say one construction expresses a closer feeling, we sense it is different to be sad from having a sadness. The former is about how you feel or your state of mind, while the latter is about what you feel, though the process may psychologically be the same in the final analysis. (However, we are here more focused on the mode of the experience while you are having it, not on the psychological process occurring in you.) Hence the difference.
Stylistically, you cannot say the same thing in two different ways. When you define something, say a word, you cannot define that word by itself; that is, you cannot say a car is a car to define car. Definitions helplessly depend on words or units of ideas basically different from but sharing the same semantic field with what's being defined. However, taking words in the same semantic field to be perfectly synonymous would be linguistically too naive.
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