Linguistic Approaches To Emotions In 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.

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.

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Emotion offers a variety of critical theoretical and methodological perspectives that interrogate the ways in which ideas about and experiences of emotion are shaped by linguistic encounters, and vice versa. Taking an interdisciplinary approach which incorporates disciplines such as linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, psychology, communication studies, education, sociology, folklore, religious studies, and literature, this book: explores and illustrates the relationship between language and emotion in the five key areas of language socialisation; culture, translation and transformation; poetry, pragmatics and power; the affective body-self; and emotion communities; situates our present-day thinking about language and emotion by providing a historical and cultural overview of distinctions and moral values that have traditionally dominated Western thought relating to emotions and their management; provides a unique insight into the multiple ways in which language incites emotion, and vice versa, especially in the context of culture. With contributions from an international range of leading and emerging scholars in their fields, The Routledge Handbook of Language and Emotion is an indispensable resource for students and researchers who are interested in incorporating interdisciplinary perspectives on language and emotion into their work.

Interest in human emotion no longer equates to unscientific speculation. 21st-century humanities scholars are paying serious attention to our capacity to express emotions and giving rigorous explanations of affect in language. We are unquestionably witnessing an ‘emotional turn’ not only in linguistics, but also in other fields of scientific research. Emotion in Discourse follows from and reflects on this scholarly awakening to the world of emotion, and in particular, to its intricate relationship with human language. The book presents both the state of the art and the latest research in an effort to unravel the various workings of the expression of emotion in discourse. It takes an interdisciplinary approach, for emotion is a multifarious phenomenon whose functions in language are enlightened by such other disciplines as psychology, neurology, or communication studies. The volume shows not only how emotion manifests at different linguistic levels, but also how it relates to aspects like linguistic appraisal, emotional intelligence or humor, as well as covering its occurrence in various genres, including scientific discourse. As such, the book contributes to an emerging interdisciplinary field which could be labeled “emotionology”, transcending previous linguistic work and providing an updated characterization of how emotion functions in human discourse.

The Handbook consists of four major sections. Each section is introduced by a main article: Theories of Emotion – General Aspects Perspectives in Communication Theory, Semiotics, and Linguistics Perspectives on Language and Emotion in Cultural Studies Interdisciplinary and Applied Perspectives The first section presents interdisciplinary emotion theories relevant for the field of language and communication research, including the history of emotion research. The second section focuses on the full range of emotion-related aspects in linguistics, semiotics, and communication theories. The next section focuses on cultural studies and language and emotion; emotions in arts and literature, as well as research on emotion in literary studies; and media and emotion. The final section covers different domains, social practices, and applications, such as society, policy, diplomacy, economics and business communication, religion and emotional language, the domain of affective computing in human-machine interaction, and language and emotion research for language education. Overall, this Handbook represents a comprehensive overview in a rich, diverse compendium never before published in this particular domain.

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.

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 book proposes a comprehensive discussion of the issue of linguistic feeling, the subject’s metalinguistic capacity to intuitively apprehend the normative – lexical, syntactic, morphological, phonological... – dimensions of a definite language he or she is acquainted with. The volume’s twelve contributions aim to revisit a concept that, through a fluctuating terminology (“Sprachgefühl,” “sentiment de la langue,” “linguistic intuitions,” etc.), had developed, since the late 18th century, within a variety of cultural contexts and research traditions, and whose theoretical, epistemological, and historical ins and outs had not been systematically explored so far. Beginning with a long opening chapter, the book consists of two parts, one tracing the multifaceted approaches to linguistic feeling from Herder to Wittgenstein, and one offering a representative overview of the debates about the issue at stake in current linguistics and philosophy, while addressing the question of the place of metacognition, normativity, and affectivity in language processes.