Abstract This chapter explores how culture and cognition intertwine in the conceptualisation of emotive meaning through the analysis of emotive factive constructions (e.g. afraid of spiders; furious at the angry words; delighted over his behaviour). It aims to identify the embodied schemas that motivate the close-knit unit of emotion adjective and prepositional phrase in the English-Italian language pair. The differences that occur in the combination between the open-class of emotion adjectives and the closed-class of prepositions in the two languages appear to be motivated by embodied cognition, but also by typological features being in close connection to cultural preferences. The dataset, compiled by querying the British National Corpus and the Italian La Repubblica Corpus , shows that English gives prominent role to the manner of experiencing emotions, while Italian foregrounds the cause that prompts emotions. The hypothesis is put forward that the different type of verbalisation may be correlated with Talmy’s dichotomy between manner-framed and path-framed languages.