Contextual And Crosslinguistic Facets Of Emotion Concepts

Emotions permeate every aspect of our lives and not only provide us with invaluable information about our environment and the people in it, but also influence our perception of situations and events. Interestingly, this domain, so ubiquitous in our everyday lives, largely resists attempts at scientific definition. One reason for this could be that emotions rarely occur in isolation but are usually combined or embedded in other states of mind. Moreover, the experience of emotions may be influenced not only by culture but also by individual language. Analysis is further complicated by the fact that emotions are abstract and require complex linguistic coding to make an invisible emotional state of the speaker at least rudimentarily visible to the listener. For this reason, the present volume aims to investigate the perception, encoding, reception, and influence potential of emotions in context and across languages using different corpora. The following questions are central: To what extent do emotions influence our perception of events and facts? and To what extent can emotion concepts be defined language-specifically, but also universally, on the basis of our perception? Therefore, the eight contributions analyze emotions in different contexts and from different starting points to uncover the cognitive mechanisms underlying the perception and influence of emotion concepts. The first four papers focus primarily on emotional and sensory experiences and interactions that are set in motion when we are confronted with emotions, while the following four focus on the different facets of emotion across languages to show which emotion concepts are language-specific or universal, and thus contribute to a better understanding of this complex field.

This volume aims to enrich the current interdisciplinary theoretical discussion of human emo-tions by presenting studies based on extensive linguistic data from a wide range of languages of the world. Each language-specific study gives detailed semantic descriptions of the meanings of culturally salient emotion words and expressions, offering fascinating insights into people's emotional lives in diverse cultures including Amharic, Chinese, German, Japanese, Lao, Malay, Mbula, Polish and Russian. The book is unique in its emphasis on empirical language data, analyzed in a framework free of ethnocentrism and not dependent upon English emotion terms, but relying instead on independently established conceptual universals. Students of languages and cultures, psychology and cognition will find this volume a rich resource of description and analysis of emotional meanings in cultural context.

First published in 1988. We are presently witnessing a renaissance of research on emotion. In the last 10 years, an increasing number of empirical studies dealing with many different aspects of emotion has appeared. This monograph of research papers counteract the tendency toward dispersion and the lack of published work in this area. A major intent of this volume is to introduce a number of new methodological tools for research on emotion (for example, facet theory, non-metrical regression for patterns, voice resynthesis, and other methods) as well as to reassert the utility of some classical tools of social science research for studies of emotion (e.g., properly constructed questionnaires). In addition, it presents a number of theoretical notions that seem relevant to a systematic study of the emotion process (such as component process theory, a taxonomy of appraisal and coping dimensions, contextual and situational approaches, and inter-channel comparison). It is hoped that the results presented in this volume can serve as hypotheses for further work in this area. In the Appendix several sets of research materials are reprinted to encourage use in student research projects.

In Everyday Conceptions of Emotion, prominent anthropologists, linguists and psychologists come together for the first time to discuss how emotions are conceptualised by people of different cultures and ages, speaking different languages. Anger, fear, jealousy and emotion itself are concepts that are bound up with the English language, embedded in a way of thinking, acting and speaking. At the same time, the metaphors underlying such concepts are often similar across languages, and children of different cultures follow common developmental pathways. The book thus discusses the interplay of social and cultural factors that humans share in their development of an understanding of the affective side of their lives. For researchers interested in emotion, development of concepts and language, cultural and linguistic influences on psychological processes.

This chapter briefly describes the general goals of the book, introduces the most fundamental features of the methodology that is employed to achieve these goals, and gives an outline of the structure of the book. A more detailed account of the goals and methodology is presented in chapters 2 and 3, respectively. What the Book Is About The main objective of this study is to attempt to answer the question: How do people understand their emotions? As we shall see in the next chapter, a large number of scholars have tried to provide answers to this question. The interest in the way people understand their emotions has led scholars to the issue of the nature of emotion concepts and emotional meaning. Since the notion of understanding involves or presupposes the notions of concept and meaning, it was only natural for scholars with an interest in the way people understand their emotions to tum their attention to emo tion concepts and the meaning associated with emotion terms. So the broader issue has often become more specific. For example, Davitz in his The Language of Emotion formulated the central question in the following way: "What does a person mean when he says someone is happy or angry or sad?" (Davitz 1969: 1).

The Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics addresses the interface between the two disciplines and offers a platform to scholars who combine both methodologies to present rigorous and interdisciplinary findings about language in real use. Corpus linguistics and Pragmatics have traditionally represented two paths of scientific thought, parallel but often mutually exclusive and excluding. Corpus Linguistics can offer a meticulous methodology based on mathematics and statistics, while Pragmatics is characterized by its effort in the interpretation of intended meaning in real language. This series will give readers insight into how pragmatics can be used to explain real corpus data and also, how corpora can illustrate pragmatic intuitions. The present volume, Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics 2014: New Empirical and Theoretical Paradigms in Corpus Pragmatics, proposes innovative research models in the liaison between pragmatics and corpus linguistics to explain language in current cultural and social contexts.

The series Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science is designed to illuminate a field which not only includes general linguistics and the study of linguistics as applied to specific languages, but also covers those more recent areas which have developed from the increasing body of research into the manifold forms of communicative action and interaction.

This comparative volume explores how speakers across languages use the concept of the ‘face’ to describe emotions, human interaction, and directions. The analyses discuss cognitive processes involved in extending human body parts to concepts beyond the body.