Emotions In Crosslinguistic Perspective

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.

This book presents new issues in the study of the interface of emotions and language, and their use in social context. Two fundamental questions are tackled: the way different languages encode emotional information and the core role emotions play in languages' structure, use and learning. Seldom treated means of expressing emotions (such as interjections, conditionals, scalarity, allocentric constructions), the social and professional impact of emotions and the latest developments in the interface of speech recognition / emotions are some of the key contributions to this volume. The cross-cultural perspective contrasts new couples of languages (among which Australian aboriginal languages, Cypriot Greek, Italian, Japanese, Romanian, Russian) and addresses sociolinguistic, pragmatic and discursive issues. Most of the papers attempt interesting theoretical articulations that aim at a better understanding of the linguistic and sociolinguistic nature of emotions. This book will be highly relevant for students and researchers interested in emotions, semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, as well as prosody and philosophy of language.

This book sheds new light on the puzzle of psychological predicates in a cross-linguistic perspective by looking at them from a variety of angles at the interfaces between event structure, lexical and viewpoint aspect, syntax and information structure. The individual chapters focus on Polish and Spanish psych verbs, which manifest new overt contrasts that often remain covert in languages such as English, e.g., aspectual distinctions, the peculiarities of dative constructions, or the role of information structure in determining the word order. One of the main contributions of the book lies in positing a new typology of basic event types enriched with the initial boundary events. Moreover, due attention is devoted to dative experiencers as compared to accusative experiencers. Although couched in the generative tradition, the main insights presented in this collection are theory neutral and may be of interest to linguists of all persuasions.

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.

Since the celebration of the 100th anniversary of Darwin's The Language of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), emotionology has become a respectable and even thriving research domain again. The domain of human emotions is most important for mankind, emotions being right in the center of our daily lives and interests. A key-role in the interdisciplinary scientific debate about emotions has now been accorded to the study of the language of emotions. The present volume offers a new approach to the study of the language of emotions insofar as it presents theories from very different perspectives. It encompasses studies by scholars from diverse disciplines such as linguistics, sociology, and psychology. The topics of the contributions also cover a range of special fields of interest in four major sections. In a first section, a discussion of theoretical issues in the analysis of emotions is presented. The conceptualization of emotions in specific cultures is analyzed in section 2. Section 3 takes a different inroad into the language of emotions by looking at developmental approaches giving evidence of the fact that the acquisition of the language of emotions is a social achievement that simultaneously determines our experience of these emotions. Section 4 is devoted to emotional language in action, that is, the contributions focus upon different types of texts and analyze how emotions are referred to and expressed in discourse.

This book offers, for the first time, a detailed comparative study of how speakers of different languages express memory concepts. While there is a robust body of psycholinguistic research that bears on how memory and language are related, there is no comparative study of how speakers themselves conceptualize memory as reflected in their use of language to talk about memory. This book addresses a key question: how do speakers of different languages talk about the experience of having prior experiences coming to mind (‘remembering’) or failing to come to mind (‘forgetting’)? A complex array of answers is provided through detailed grammatical and semantic investigation of different languages, including English, German, Polish, Russian and also a number of non-Indo-European languages, Amharic, Cree, Dalabon, Korean, and Mandarin. In addition, the book calls for a broader interdisciplinary engagement by urging that cognitive semantics be integrated with other sciences of memory.

The study of word meanings promises important insights into the nature of the human mind by revealing what people find to be most cognitively significant in their experience. However, as we learn more about the semantics of various languages, we are faced with an interesting problem. Different languages seem to be telling us different stories about the mind. For example, important distinctions made in one language are not necessarily made in others. What are we to make of these cross-linguistic differences? How do they arise? Are they created by purely linguistic processes operating over the course of language evolution? Or do they reflect fundamental differences in thought? In this sea of differences, are there any semantic universals? Which categories might be given by the genes, which by culture, and which by language? And what might the cross-linguistic similarities and differences contribute to our understanding of conceptual and linguistic development? The kinds of mapping principles, structures, and processes that link language and non-linguistic knowledge must accommodate not just one language but the rich diversity that has been uncovered. The integration of knowledge and methodologies necessary for real progress in answering these questions has happened only recently, as experimental approaches have been applied to the cross-linguistic study of word meaning. In Words and the Mind, Barbara Malt and Phillip Wolff present evidence from the leading researchers who are carrying out this empirical work on topics as diverse as spatial relations, events, emotion terms, motion events, objects, body-part terms, causation, color categories, and relational categories. By bringing them together, Malt and Wolff highlight some of the most exciting cross-linguistic and cross-cultural work on the language-thought interface, from a broad array of fields including linguistics, anthropology, cognitive and developmental psychology, and cognitive neuropsychology. Their results provide some answers to these questions and new perspectives on the issues surrounding them.

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.