Essay: mood n. And feeling n.

Essay: mood n. And feeling n.

Korean students often confuse the English expressions mood and feeling. Part of the difference between the two is meaning: mood is the way someone is feeling at a particular time, whereas feeling is reacting to the things emotionally. The difference between the two expressions is not only in meaning, but also in usage. To find out the difference in usage between the two expressions, I examined 100 KWIC concordance lines from The Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies, 2008-). This technique revealed typical phrases in which the expressions mood and feeling to usually occur.

Because there come similar propositions and adjectives in the vicinity of mood and feeling, it is hard to find difference between them just by comparing the result of searching in corpus. It becomes more clear when it is considered as a part of a phrase. That was “in the mood of [something]”. Similarly, mood appeared in the phrases “in the mood for [something]” and “in the mood to [something]”. These examples show that mood is often used to tell that someone wants to do something. Likewise, feeling is followed by prepositions. In the sample concordance lines, the phrases “feeling for [someone]” talk about someone’s love and affection toward some others.

Unlike mood, Feeling can be experienced. According to the concordance lines, there are phrases “Feeling of [something]” and “feeling in [one’s part of body]”. When it is used “I have feeling of hunger”, the speaker can experience his hunger. Also in the case of “He has feeling in his legs”, he can experience something in his leg. In contrast, mood cannot refer something which can be experienced.

Both expressions sometimes refer negative emotion. Mood sometimes appeared in phrases such as “someone is in a mood.” It means that someone is angry. In the same way, “hurt someone’s feeling” and “for someone’s feeling” talk negative emotion like embarrassed, offend or upset.

The corpus study indicated some differences in meaning in phrase between mood and feeling.  I expect that learning these typical patterns will help Korean students use mood and feeling more naturally.

Reference:

Davies, Mark. (2008-) The Corpus of Contemporary American English: 450 million words, 1990-present. Available online at http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/.