Linguistic Approaches to Emotions in Context PDF
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Linguistic Approaches to Emotions in Context Pragmatics & Beyond New Series (P&BNS) Pragmatics & Beyond New Series is a continuation of Pragmatics & Beyond and its Companion Series. The New Series offers a selection of high quality work covering the full richness of Pragmatics as an interdisciplinary field, within language sciences. For an overview of all books published in this series, please see http://benjamins.com/catalog/pbns Editor Associate Editor Anita Fetzer Andreas H. Jucker University of Augsburg University of Zurich Founding Editors Jacob L. Mey Herman Parret Jef Verschueren University of Southern Belgian National Science Belgian National Science Denmark Foundation, Universities of Foundation, Louvain and Antwerp University of Antwerp Editorial Board Robyn Carston Sachiko Ide Deborah Schiffrin University College London Japan Women’s University Georgetown University Thorstein Fretheim Kuniyoshi Kataoka Paul Osamu Takahara University of Trondheim Aichi University Kobe City University of Miriam A. Locher Foreign Studies John C. Heritage University of California at Los Universität Basel Sandra A. Thompson Angeles Sophia S.A. Marmaridou University of California at University of Athens Santa Barbara Susan C. Herring Indiana University Srikant Sarangi Teun A. van Dijk Cardiff University Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Masako K. Hiraga Barcelona St. Paul’s (Rikkyo) University Marina Sbisà University of Trieste Yunxia Zhu The University of Queensland 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 John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of 8 the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984. CIP data is available from the Library of Congress. Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, issn 0922-842X ; v. 241 isbn 978 90 272 5646 1 (Hb ; alk. paper) isbn 978 90 272 7074 0 (Eb) © 2014 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa 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).
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