Languages and Emotions

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.

Celem artykułu jest zaprezentowanie wybranych memów internetowych, pełniących funkcję ekspresywną, w ramach pól semantycznych pięciu grup uczuć: grupy radości, smutku, złości, strachu i wstydu. Artykuł jest także próbą pokazania sposobów językowego i ikonicznego wyrażania wymienionych emocji przez młodych użytkowników Internetu. W artykule wyjaśnione zostały podstawowe pojęcia i mechanizmy komunikacyjne związane z memami. Scharakteryzowano także swoiste cechy komunikacji internetowej, będące źródłem powstania memów. Wzięto pod uwagę również najważniejsze teorie dotyczące opisu emocji i sposobów ich komunikowania. W toku analizy zwrócono uwagę na różnice w sposobie określania uczuć należących do jednej kategorii, lecz o odmiennym natężeniu. Ujawniono zdolność memów do przekazywania zróżnicowanych form ekspresji. Zwrócono uwagę na funkcjonalność komunikacyjną memów, opartą na dominacji obrazu nad tekstem, co czyni memy bliskie rzeczywistemu okazywaniu uczuć. Wnioski z badania zestawiono z wynikiem ankiety przeprowadzonej w 2013 roku, dotyczącej nazywania emocji przez dzieci i młodzież z Białegostoku. Rezultaty obu analiz okazały się zbieżne pod względem sposobów nazywania i okazywania emocji oraz ich wartościowania.
W konkluzji wskazano cechy charakterystyczne omówionych memów oraz ich zarówno negatywne, jak i pozytywne oddziaływanie na język młodzieży. Zauważono ich walory komunikacyjne, które wpływają na popularność tego rodzaju znaków i czynią je właściwymi środkami wyrażania ekspresji.

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 chapter discusses the semantic values of the diminutives in Dalabon, an Australian Aboriginal language of the Gunwinyguan family (Top End, Northern Territory). Denotational values include primarily age (on human-denoting nouns) and secondarily size (on inanimate nouns). In addition, Dalabon diminutives are frequently used to expression compassion, as well as endearment and approval of compassion (when a speaker witnesses someone being compassionate to someone else). Less frequently, diminutives can convey endearment and generic empathy. Although diminutives, and particularly their emotional senses, have not been described systematically for Australian Aboriginal languages, there are indications that the expression of compassion by means of evaluative morphology may be relatively widespread on the Australian continent.

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.

Abstract. Analyses of emotion concepts explicitly taking (linguistic) context into account have been placed into the spotlight recently. In line with this research, this paper sets out to examine the emotion concept of ANGER/ AERGER in c o n t e x t from a cross-linguistic perspective (English/ German), with a particular focus on the sub-unit emotion parameter intensification. Its goal is the explicit accommodation of context, i.e. the identification of language-specific emotion patterns which manifest themselves in patterned co-occurrences of intensifiers and emotion lexemes. A fine-grained contextual analysis, taking both the local and more global context into account, disclosed important cross-linguistic differences in the display of ANGER/ AERGER in English and German narratives.

The article considers the possibility of translating the names of emotions into other languages, taking into account cultural and sociolinguistic factors. Based on the concepts created by researchers in traductology (e.g. John C. Catford) or cultural linguistics (e.g. Anna Wierzbicka), it has been shown that the names of emotions can be perceived as untranslatable, especially in the context of searching for their one-word equivalents in other languages. Attention was paid to such names, the meaning of which is closely related to the culture of a given society (e.g. historical events) and therefore they should be classified as the so-called mentifacts, defined by Donald W. Klopf as affective and cognitive factors shaping the perception of the world by a given community. The proposed way of explaining the meanings of the names of emotions is the description of exemplary situations as a result of which they arise or with which they are commonly associated in a given society. In the summary, it was emphasized that the names of emotions are keywords with which you can learn not only a foreign language, but also culture.

This paper is presented at the Kongres Internasional Masyarakat Linguistik Indonesia (The International Congress of the Linguistic Society of Indonesia [KIMLI 2016]) in Bali, in August 2016. The presentation is based on a pilot study from a small, preliminary dataset. The topic is part of my PhD thesis (Rajeg 2019) on the metaphors in the lexical field of HAPPINESS in Indonesian. The goal of the paper is to introduce quantitative and visualisation technique in exploring semantic differences between near-synonyms regarding their preferred metaphorical conceptualisations. The precursor of this study can be seen in Rajeg (2014).Abstract of the paper is available from the previous version of this repository.To cite, click the dark pink Cite button and select the citation style through the drop-down button. The default citation style is DataCite

Tagung der Graduiertenschule des Exzellenzclusters "Languages of Emotion" an der Freien Universität Berlin, 13. bis 15. Oktober 2011. Konzept und Organisation: Tara Beaney, Fabian Bernhardt, Roman Ebel, Nora Hagemann, Carmen Herzog, Tessa Jahn, Hauke Lehmann, Viktoria Räuchle, Maria Römer, Daniela Schönle, Aline Vater.
Zum Inhalt der Tagung: Zwischen dem Sagbaren und dem Unsagbaren verläuft eine feine, bewegliche Grenze, die den Bereich dessen, worüber man sprechen kann und darf, von der Sphäre des Unaussprechlichen scheidet. Ziel der Tagung ist es, die Schnittstelle von Emotion und Sprache aus unterschiedlichen Perspektiven zu beleuchten und auf diese Weise einen Beitrag zur Ausdifferenzierung eines unsicheren Grenzgebietes zu leisten.