Emotions in Languages

This presentation assumes that conveying emotion (e.g. happiness, anger, fear, surprise, etc.) is a foundational element of verbal and non-verbal communication. Although a prominent topic of study among psychologists and anthropologists, emotion and its expression are often ignored by linguists and translation theorists, who instead tend to focus on other types of meaning. In this presentation, I offer first a brief sketch of some of the ways that emotion is communicated in language, and then I focus on a selection of grammatical constructions in English, Greek, and Hebrew where each has a prominent emotive component.

Emotions called as the negative ones may be recognized in other people through signs sent verbally or non-verbally. Language enables communicating emotions which are related to the particular situations and other persons’ statements. There are many state expressions which
indicate emotionality of statements. They are commonly known among native speakers, but they are new to foreigners who learn Polish as a foreign language. It is often complicated to decode their meaning because of their metaphoricalness or colloquiality and that is another barrier for foreigners. They may also have problems with the cultural symbols, which are connected with negative emotions and states, and differences between Polish culture and native culture. It is very
helpful to familiarize them with the sayings used by Polish people to express negative emotions. The authors of the coursebooks are aware of it and tackle the issue in a differential way. The article forms an analysis of the chosen teaching materials in terms of the way of expressing the negative emotions in Polish language. The books, which have been explored, are coursebooks, series of coursebooks and books concentrated on language abilities such as reading or speaking.

This article presents a preliminary typology of emotional connotations in evaluative morphology, starting with diminutives and augmentatives. I inventory the emotional meanings and connotations found in a sample of nineteen languages for diminutives, and nine languages plus a few additional regional studies for augmentatives. Given the small size of the samples, this typology can only remain preliminary, but it does highlight a number of points. Across languages and continents, diminutives can express positive emotions such as compassion, love and admiration, as well as negative emotions such as contempt. The emotional connotations of augmentatives are more limited, but do display a blend of positive and negative emotions including contempt and repulsion, admiration and respect, endearment and compassion. Diminutives and augmentatives do not contrast sharply with respect to emotional valence (positive or negative), but while diminutives are anchored in intimacy, the emotions conveyed by augmentatives more often relate to broader social contexts.

Ponsonnet (2014) has shown that Dalabon, a Gunwinyguan language of northern Australia (non-Pama-nyungan) has very few emotion nouns –  instead, its emotion lexicon contains mostly verbs and adjectives. The language has only two emotion nouns proper: yolh-no ‘pep, feelings’, and yirru ‘conflict, anger’.

What are the causes and implications of this scarcity of emotion nouns in Dalabon? Is this an areal feature? Does it result from a structural property of the language? How does it relate to Dalabon speakers’ shared conceptual representations about emotions? Indeed, it seems that in Dalabon, the rarity of emotion nouns correlates with a limitation on the types of emotion metaphors available – which relates to shared representations of emotions. But the question of the directionality remains open: Does language reflect shared concepts and representations about emotions? Or does the rarity of nouns determine metaphors, which may in turn determine shared representations?

To begin answering these questions, this article presents a pilot survey of emotion nouns in a small sample of nine other Australian languages. The observations resulting from this survey are two-fold. Firstly, Australian languages, in general, seem to have few emotion nouns, although there may be nuances, possibly due to differences in typological profiles. Secondly, there is some semantic convergence among the nouns documented in the ten languages surveyed. Indeed, the semantic profiles of the two emotion nouns (meaning ‘conflict, anger’, and a generic term for ‘feelings’) found in Dalabon are matched by nouns in most of the other languages in the sample.

This article analyzes some of the lexical semantic features of Barunga Kriol, an Australian creole language (Northern Territory, Australia), in comparison with Dalabon, one of the Australian Aboriginal languages replaced by Barunga Kriol. Focusing on the semantic domain of emotions, this study offers insights into how creole languages select and organize semantic meanings, and to what extent this results in lexical loss or retention. I spell out the exact nature of the lexical resemblances between the two languages, and highlight major differences as well. The conclusions of the study are twofold. Firstly, I show that the Barunga Kriol emotion lexicon shares a great many properties with the Dalabon emotion lexicon. As a result, speakers in Barunga Kriol and Dalabon respectively are often able to package meaning in very similar ways: the two languages offer comparable means of describing events in the world. From that point of view, language shift can be considered to have a lesser impact. Secondly, I show that the lexical resemblances between Barunga Kriol and Dalabon are not limited to simple cases where the lexemes in each language share the same forms and/or meanings. Instead, lexical resemblances relate to a number of other properties in semantics and combinatorics, and I devise a preliminary typology of these lexical resemblances. Beyond the comparison between Barunga Kriol and Dalabon, this typology may tentatively serve as a grid to evaluate lexical resemblances between languages more generally.

This article presents a preliminary typology of emotional connotations in evaluative morphology, starting with diminutives and augmentatives. I inventory the emotional meanings and connotations found in a sample of nineteen languages for diminutives, and nine languages plus a few additional regional studies for augmentatives. Given the small size of the samples, this typology can only remain preliminary, but it does highlight a number of points. Across languages and continents, diminutives can express positive emotions such as compassion, love and admiration, as well as negative emotions such as contempt. The emotional connotations of augmentatives are more limited, but display a blend of positive and negative emotions including contempt and repulsion, admiration and respect, endearment and compassion. Diminutives and augmentatives do not contrast sharply with respect to emotional valence (positive or negative), but while diminutives are anchored in intimacy, the emotions conveyed b...

This article presents the first systematic typological study of emotional expressions involving body parts at the scale of a continent, in this case the Australian continent. The role of body parts in figurative descriptions of emotions, a well-established phenomenon across the world, is known to be widespread in Australian languages. This article presents a typology of body-based emotional expressions across a balanced sample of 67 languages, where 30 distinct body parts occur in emotional expressions. The belly is by far the most frequent, and a dozen others also have significant representations. The study shows how the properties of these body parts-e.g. whether they are internal organs, visible facial parts-partly determines which historical scenarios led to their linguistic associations with emotions, and in turn, their semantic and figurative properties.

The paper discusses animal names used as terms of endearment in the Polish language. The study is based on questionnaire results. On the basis of the research study conducted, a typology of faunal terms is proposed, comprising conventional, occasional and individual affectonyms.

This article presents a preliminary typology of emotional connotations in evaluative morphology, starting with diminutives and augmentatives. I inventory the emotional meanings and connotations found in a sample of nineteen languages for diminutives, and nine languages plus a few additional regional studies for augmentatives. Given the small size of the samples, this typology can only remain preliminary, but it does highlight a number of points. Across languages and continents, diminutives can express positive emotions such as compassion, love and admiration, as well as negative emotions such as contempt. The emotional connotations of augmentatives are more limited, but do display a blend of positive and negative emotions including contempt and repulsion, admiration and respect, endearment and compassion. Diminutives and augmentatives do not contrast sharply with respect to emotional valence (positive or negative), but while diminutives are anchored in intimacy, the emotions conveyed by augmentatives more often relate to broader social contexts.

The article presents the most important aspects of the issue of emotions and theirexpressing in Polish as a foreign language and in Polish culture as a foreign culture. The basicassumption adopted in the text is the need of teaching the ways of expressing emotions – includingnegative ones – in foreign languages and cultures. Learners are not sure whether they can commu-nicate e.g. anger, nervousness or fear in a comprehensible and adequate way without knowledgeabout the possibilities of communicating psychological experiences. The issue has been set in aninterdisciplinary context, taking into account the achievements of authors who perceive emotionsin the context of the culture-language relationship. The possibilities of perceiving the issue ofemotions in the glottodidactic process have been discussed. Author’s quantitative empirical re-search on the ability to recognize and express negative emotions by foreigners has also been de-scribed. Its results form the basis of the didactic implications formulated in the article. It has beenemphasized in the recapitulation of the argument that there is a need to include the issue discussedin the text in the Polish-language glottodidactic process.