In this paper we show that the meaning of words referring to emotions has a structuring impact on their textual environment. By analyzing the linguistic processes involved in two different types of words expressing emotions (interpersonal emotion, e.g. jalousie and emotion caused by something or someone, e.g. joie), we show that meaning in discourse operates as a continuous phenomenon on different levels interacting with each other (phrase, sentence, paragraph, text). The corpus chosen for the study is a newspaper corpus compiled as part of the EMOLEX project. Finally we propose a global functional model for the analysis of the lexicon of emotions.