Table Of ContentLinguistic Approaches to Emotions in Context
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Volume 241
Linguistic Approaches to Emotions in Context
Edited by Fabienne Baider and Georgeta Cislaru
Linguistic Approaches
to Emotions in Context
Edited by
Fabienne Baider
University of Cyprus
Georgeta Cislaru
Université Sorbonne nouvelle
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Table of contents
Linguistic approaches to emotion in context 1
Fabienne Baider and Georgeta Cislaru
part i. Emotion, philosophy and language
Emotions: Various “language-games” which open the door to grammar 21
Béatrice Godart-Wendling
Passion, a forgotten feeling 3 9
Vida Vukoja
part ii. Expressing and interpreting emotion
On “Disgust” 7 3
Cliff Goddard
A corpus-based construction of emotion verb scales 99
Christiane Fellbaum and Yvette Yannick Mathieu
Patterns of allocentric emotional expressions, a contrastive study 113
Georgeta Cislaru
The expression of emotions in conditionals: A study of Modern Greek
political speech 137
Martha Lampropoulou
Conceptual metaphors of anger in popularized scientific texts:
A contrastive (English/Greek/French) cognitive-discursive approach 159
Maria Constantinou
Bad feelings in context 189
Fabienne Baider
Linguistic Approaches to Emotions in Context
part iii. Doing emotion: Prosody
Emotions and prosodic structure: Who is in charge? 215
Philippe Martin
Prosody and emotion in Greek: Evidence from spontaneous-speech
corpora analysis 231
Dimitrios Kotsifas
Cross-cultural perception of some Japanese politeness
and impoliteness expressions 251
Albert Rilliard, Donna Erickson, João Antônio De Moraes
and Takaaki Shochi
part iv. Pragmatic use of emotion
Verbal aggressiveness or cooperative support? Emotion communication
in French and Italian professional contexts 279
Colette Mrowa-Hopkins and Antonella Strambi
‘I must do everything to eliminate my negative attitude’: Polish general
practitioners’ emotions toward patients with medically unexplained
symptoms 309
Agnieszka Sowińska
Language learning and making the mundane special 331
Simon Coffey
Name index 347
Subject index 355
Linguistic approaches to emotion in context
Fabienne Baider1 and Georgeta Cislaru2
1University of Cyprus, Cyprus and 2SYLED-CLESTHIA, Sorbonne nouvelle
Paris 3 University, France
1. Introduction
The articles in this volume attest to the growing interest over the last thirty years in
emotions and emotional expression in Linguistics (for reviews on the topic see
Wilce 2004; Besnier 1990; Leavitt 1996; Lutz and White 1986). The book aims to
contribute to the ongoing debate regarding the precise nature of emotions: are they
discrete categories as suggested by Ekman (1980) and Plutchik (1980), or are they
organized in a continuum as Schlosberg (1954) concluded?
Many of the essays question the very function of emotions, which have been var-
iously defined throughout history. For example, Aristotle (1997) regarded emotions
as a tool of rhetoric (Ethique), while some scientists consider them as an organizational
device since “assessing the certainty with which goals can be maintained is critical as
to which emotion is experienced” (Stein and Trabasso 1992, 225); and there are still
others who see them as a way to covertly control people’ s behavior (Harré and Parrott
1996, 5). The articulation of “fact” and “value” in the affective domain (cf. Charland
and Zachar eds. 2008), especially within the framework of appraisal theories (Frijda
ed. 1993 and 2007), is one of the underlying themes in the relevant literature: some
authors have identified (cf. Haidt 2003) a specific category of “moral emotions,” either
positive (compassion, gratitude) or negative (disgust, shame), each of which may be
characterized from the point of view of its elicitors and the actions involved.
The papers included in this volume focus mainly on appraisal theories and
corpus linguistics; in this way, they offer context-bound descriptions of emotional
expression and emotion’ s functioning in communication. There are articles whose
semantic approach to emotions is based on Wierzbicka’ s NSM scripts, although
they also incorporate other frameworks such as Brown and Levinson’ s theory
(Rilliard et al. this volume) or Giora and Kecskes’ s proposals (Baider this volume);
others borrow from Lakoff and Johnson’ s cognitive semantic concepts (Constan-
tinou this volume). In their examination of emotions, most articles work with/
from various linguistic and semantic theories and methodologies, e.g., Construc-
tion Grammar, Discourse Analysis, Conversational Analysis, etc.
Fabienne Baider and Georgeta Cislaru
2. Theoretical and methodological highlights
2.2 The ‘emotion question’ in language
The emotion question is anchored in the broader and ongoing debates centered
on nature vs culture, biology vs culture, mind vs body (Channouf and Rouan
2002; Beatty 2005, 19), and the relationship between emotion and language is
usually discussed in terms of such dichotomies. Thus, we find that emotion has
either been a subject of study in functional and anthropological linguistics
(Sapir 1921; Hymes 1972), or that it has been examined as an exclusively neurop-
sychological object (cf. Kensinger and Corkin 2003, for instance). However, re-
cent studies have shown the importance of linguistic emotional competence, for
example, in regard to cases of alexithymia (Sifneos 1967; Berthoz et al. 2011),
where we see biology and society articulated by communication needs. The emo-
tion question can no longer be separated from linguistic analysis; on the contrary,
it must be considered in order to highlight the structure and the functioning of
any language.
Despite the ambiguity of the notion, anyone investigating emotions must be-
gin with a particular definition of the concept of emotion and with a theory of the
relationship between emotion and cognition, feelings and bodily processes. Thus,
researchers can focus on what structures emotions or what emotions structure;
they can attempt to understand how people interpret the expression of emotions,
and in this way arrive at a definition of the term (Beatty 2005, 18). This volume
reflects the diversity of research objectives, and reveals that the way emotions
are defined will be based on how researchers conceive their nature and their
functioning.
Most papers in this volume first examine the main theories on emotion: 1. the
evolutionary hypothesis defended by Darwin (1872) and Frijda (1986) among
others; 2. the cognitive approach as formulated by Scherer (1984); 3. social con-
structivism, which argues that emotions are cultural products arising from learned
social rules (Harré 1986). All authors explain their choice of definition/classifica-
tion, although most agree that there are both basic and complex emotions, differ-
ing in the precise definitions of the two categories, i.e., whether basic means easily
identified through facial expressions, or triggering a behavior which favors the
survival of the individual (Plutchik 1980).
All the contributions in this volume are inspired by a core principle according
to which language structure and use are not isolated, but constantly influenced by
various contextual phenomena, including emotion. If emotions can be expressed
through different channels, facial expressions (cf. Ekman) and language (cf. Wilce)
are the two most common ways to communicate emotions. As Wilce (2009) has
Linguistic approaches to emotion in context
explained, most classic categories or levels of language – such as morphology,
syntax, vocabulary, prosody, etc. – can be affected by emotions. Emotions thus
interfere or interact with the language structure and the language practice or per-
ception, as different linguistic devices – such as prosody, interjections, verbs, con-
ditionals, constructions, metaphors, etc. – contribute to the conceptualization and
the regulation of emotions (see also Niemeier and Dirven eds. 1997). In addition
to the specific emotional expression (emotional terms or metaphors, for instance),
there are also more complex processes that overtly associate an emotional mean-
ing to different semantic and pragmatic values: this points to the ubiquity of emo-
tions in language and their capacity to interfere with all levels of language use and
interpretation. In other words, “[t]he loci of emotion in language are as numerous
as locusts in a plague” (Wilce 2009, 39). The diversity of linguistic means that may
be used to express emotions – and, consequently, to interpret them – is an impor-
tant descriptive issue:
Once de-essentialized, emotion can be viewed as a cultural and interpersonal
process of naming, justifying, and persuading people in relationship to each
other. Emotional meaning is then a social rather than an individual achieve-
ment. (Lutz 1988, 5)
Emotional meaning is crucial, for instance, to the ability to recognize and identify
emotional prosody (Schönweiler 2004, Kotsifas this volume, Rilliard et al. this
volume) as well as in the capacity to appropriately use language to express and
provoke emotions (Lutz 1988; Rosaldo 1980 and 1984; Wikan 1992; Cislaru this
volume; Lampropoulou this volume; Mrowa-Hopkins and Strambi this volume)
– in fact these are some of the most topical issues in the linguistic study of emo-
tions, as detailed by Wilce (2009, 40–52) in an overview of different-level ap-
proaches to the relation between language and emotion. A number of papers in
this volume use this point of view to analyze little-studied areas such as condition-
als (Lampropoulou this volume), allocentric patterns (Cislaru this volume) and
scalarity (Fellbaum and Mathieu this volume).
Moreover, it is possible to hypothesize the existence of an “emotional seman-
tic,” as we see in Sartre’ s 1938 statement: “[...] emotion reflects its meaning. And
its meaning is, indeed, the totality of relationships of human-reality to the world”
(Sartre 2010, 66). Emotion is therefore situated in a process of appraisal (Lazarus
1991; Frijda ed. 1993). Although the great majority of languages seem to exploit
the same linguistic means, they implement them in various ways, and cultural
differences are apparent in linguistic choices (Palmer and Occhi eds. 1999;
Eckert 2010; Baider this volume; Cislaru this volume; Constantinou this volume;
Goddard this volume).
