Sadness and fear. A study into the language of negative emotions

Language and Emotion. An International Handbook, 2022

Psychology studies prioritize a broad understanding of anger as a prototypically negative and confrontational emotion triggered by an offense against the self or relevant others, typically leading to the experiencer's loss of control and (impulse for) retribution. However, this generalization overlooks the rich variability of anger concepts available in different languages and disregards salient aspects of both within-and cross-cultural variation in anger experiences. This chapter seeks to demonstrate that language-based approaches are well-suited to capture this variation. To this end, after a succinct discussion of the ubiquity of the anger lexicon across languages, we systematically review aspects relevant for the differentiation of anger terms within and across languages. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the utility of language-based research for psychological expert theories of emotion and with an argument for both multi-methodological and interdisciplinary synergies in future research.

Russian journal of linguistics, 2024

Cognitive linguistic investigations into the metaphorical conceptualization of ANGER suggest that languages are remarkably similar on a schematic level, with intensity and control as two, possibly universal dimensions underlying the metaphorical conceptualization of ANGER. These dimensions, however, can manifest themselves in language-specific metaphors. Yet arriving at a definitive answer to the question of universality versus variation is hindered by (a) a relatively limited number of systematic, contrastive analyses; and (b) varied methodologies, with some papers adopting a typebased account, while others following a token-based analysis. We take up both challenges in the present paper with the aim of offering a more definitive answer to the question of the universality and variation of ANGER metaphors. We investigate the ANGER metaphors of a type-based analysis, focusing on dictionary data of ANGER-related idioms, and a token-based analysis, focusing on data collected from online corpora, in three languages: (American) English (2,000 random instances of the lemma anger from the Corpus of Contemporary American English), Hungarian (1,000 instances of the lemma düh from the Hungarian National Corpus) and Russian (1,000 instances of the lemma gnev from the Russian National Corpus). The lexical data were analyzed with the well-established Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP). Our results indicate that there is a great deal of congruence relative to shared metaphors in both approaches, but this derives from specific-level metaphors in the lexical approach, whereas it derives from more schematic, generic-level metaphors in the corpus-based approach. The study shows that the full picture of the metaphorical conceptualization of a complex emotion concept such as ANGER can only emerge with the combination of the type-and token-based approach.

2000

Metaphor and Intercultural Communication, 2014

Studies in the field of cognitive linguistics developed by such linguists as Lakoff or Johnson emphasize the importance of the universality of human experience and its reflection in the languages as well as the importance of being sensitive to how and why we say certain things. The universality of human experience refers here to the importance of the basic phenomena in our life, such as our bodies, how they function and respond to life experiences, and the influence of environmental phenomena on how we shape our thoughts by means of language. By assuming the importance of the universal, cognitive scientists do not intend to eradicate the role of cultural patterns expressed by language. But the awareness of what we have in common as human beings, what we share and what is expressed by our languages which in fact are not so different in their conceptual framework, allows us to facilitate development of multilingualism and intercultural communication. The present study looks at the fie...

LANGUAGE, LITERATURE, AND EMOTIONS: Proceedings from the Seventh International Conference at the Faculty of Foreign Languages: Language, Literature, and Emotions, 18 and 19 May 2018. Belgrade: Alfa BK University, 2019

Psycho-physiological responses to emotions are a prominent feature of many emotional experiences. In language, these responses can stand for a whole emotional experience by means of conceptual metonymies. Although it is generally understood that emotions are relatively universal psycho-biological mechanisms, the linguistic realization of responses to them need not correspond fully to the objectively observed psychological and physiological changes to one"s organism. This paper addresses the linguistically coded range of psycho-physiological responses to anger in English and Serbian, based on the research of the British National Corpus and Corpus of Contemporary Serbian. The reactions that are in focus of this paper are coded with phrases containing a prepositional phrase with WITH in English (with anger), and OD+Ngen in Serbian (od besa). The emotion nouns that follow denote concomitant emotions, which are simultaneous with the reaction coded in the language. One aim is to show the differences English and Serbian display in relation to the objectively measured changes in anger. The other is to compare the linguistic means each language employs. The results have shown both similarities and differences-the former stemming from the fact that both languages belong to the so-called Western civilization, while the latter highlight the underlying cultural differences.…

I will suggest that the English word 'anger' and its counterparts in diverse languages of the world are based on concepts of anger that have a great deal of complexity. This conceptual complexity derives from several sources: (1) the metaphors and metonymies that apply to the concepts in various languages; (2) the prototypes of anger that people share in these cultures, and (3) the many different senses that the word anger and its counterparts have in different languages. We can ask: Are there any universal aspects of the concept(s) of anger? On the basis of linguistic evidence from English, Chinese, Japanese, Hungarian, Zulu and Wolof, I will suggest that there are, but I will also claim that some of the aspects are culture specific. This raises the further important question of why there is both universality and culture specificity in the conceptualization of this emotion. At stake is the issue of which of the following two contradictory claims is valid: (1) that anger is conceptualized in the same way universally, or (2) that anger is a social construction and thus varies considerably from culture to culture. I will propose a compromise view, which can be called 'body-based social constructionism', that enables us to see anger and its counterparts as both universal and culture specific.

2018

Emotion concepts across different cultures and languages have been studied extensively. New research on emotion concepts can efficiently capture the “experience-near” and “universal” aspects of cultures and languages for the construction of a language-independent semantic metalanguage, namely the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) (Goddard, 1998). Wierzbicka (1999) claims that lexical discriminations in the area of emotions (as well as in other semantic fields) provide important clues to the speakers’ conceptualizations, and thus, a considerable amount of lexical data collection and of serious semantic analysis is needed before any universals in the area of emotion concepts can be proposed. Based on the classification of the cognitive scenarios for emotion terms in Wierzbicka (1999), the current study investigated one area of the emotion lexicon in English and Turkish, that is, a set of terms within the domain of “I don’t want things like this to happen”. It explored how these conc...

2004

Le développement des méthodes empiriques pour la description des concepts d'émotion, qui sont sensitives à la variation sociale, reste un objectif important pour la linguistique et la psychologie. Cette étude démontre la faisabilité de l'application de l'analyse componentielle et multivariée de traits linguistiques d'usage (usage-feature analysis ou profile-based analysis) pour la description de telles structures socio-conceptuelles. L'étude de cas examine le concept de anger (colère) en anglais britannique et américain et est basée sur les extraits de journaux intimes électroniques. Trois structures sous-jacentes sont identifiées, chaque structure étant déterminée par variations dans les causes et les réponses de l'événement de colère. L'étude emploie l'analyse des correspondances multiples pour identifier ces tendances quantitatives (patterns).