People resort to creative ways of expressing their feelings; the use of colour terms is no exception. Previous research has shown that colours form an interesting domain of expression, especially through their associations with specific emotions which can arise via several cognitive processes (Soriano & Valenzuela 2009). The cross-cultural nature of these associations, however, is disputable. This study aims to provide a cross-linguistic constructional analysis (Boas 2010; Hoffmann & Trousdale 2013) of the causal construction using colour adjectives (e.g. he is green with envy; she turned red with anger) in which such associations play a central role (Sandford 2014). Specifically, it investigates the degree of formal and semantic variation of this construction in three different languages, namely Dutch, English, and French. Moreover, an analysis of the productivity of this construction (Barðdal 2008) shows how it ties into the expression of intensification, as this study argues that the causal construction with colours allows for the expression of an extreme emotion or state, which was only briefly discussed in previous research (De Knop 2013, 2014). To test the hypothesis that the causal construction shows slight cross-linguistic differences while mostly allowing for an intensified reading, a corpus study was conducted using the TenTen web corpora on the Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al. 2014). Instances of the causal construction in the three investigated languages were coded for construction type, semantics and lexical fillers. Their overall productivity, as well as the productivity of each colour per emotion and each emotion per colour, was then calculated using two different measures. The results show comparable productivity rates in the three languages, with more variation in the ‘emotion’ slot than in the ‘colour’ slot of the construction, but noticeable cross-linguistic differences in terms of the associations between colours and emotions. This study suggests that the causal construction ...