The interest of this thesis lies in understanding how Portuguese speakers use it to materialize the mention of emotion through a linguistic perspective. The general objective of the research is to create resources to improve the annotation of the semantic field of emotions in the Portuguese language based on the AC/DC project, which gathers and makes publicly available annotated corpora and tools for linguistic research on Portuguese language. and Emocionário, which is both a semantic annotation project and lexicon of emotions. Initially, the research gives an overview of emotion studies; aligning itself with perspectives that refute the universality of emotions and approaches that postulate basic emotions; and contrasts the interest in emotion description to the already consolidated area of Sentiment Analysis, comparing five lexicons of emotion and/or polarities in Portuguese to Emocionário. From a broad sweep of the AC/DC corpora, three main paths were taken towards investigating emotion words: (i) an analysis of the twenty-four emotion groups previously composing the Emocionário lexicon in order to delineate characteristics and challenges in the study of emotion description in the Portuguese language; (ii) a thorough revision of one-third of the Emocionário lexicon groups; and (iii) searches for the lexical-syntactic pattern sentimento de N and for expressions annotated by the Esqueleto project used to describe emotion. The corpora analysis in the light of the lemmas previously belonging to the Emocionário lexicon groups showed, amongst other characteristics, the relevance of lexicalized expressions for the analysis of the emotion description, the types of arguments of verbs and affixes that can cause variation in meaning, and variations in tense and verbal mode that lead to a change in meaning. Amongst the challenges are polysemous words and expressions and the difficulty in detecting different meanings in words that share the same grammatical class, based only on morphosyntactic information. This analysis enabled the structuring and documentation of a revision methodology that may be applied in other groups in the future. The main contributions of this thesis derive from the analyzes and explorations in corpora: the exclusion of lemmas with non-emotional meanings from the Emocionário lexicon groups; the creation of emotion groups Ausência and Outra, enriching the lexicon; the detection of more than nine hundred lemmas and expressions from the searches for the sentimento de N pattern and the connections established between the semantic fields of emotion and the human body; in addition to discoveries of lexical fields rarely mentioned in the literature on emotion, such as coletividade, estranhamento, espiritualidade, parentesco e atos automotivados, which helped in the investigation of how Portuguese speakers crystallize emotions in language.