Aww: The Emotion of Perceiving Cuteness

Language Sciences, 1997

The relationship between language and emotions can be viewed from two angles. First, language, in a broad sense, can be viewed as being done (performed) 'emotively'. Taking this angle, it is commonly assumed that people, at least on occasions, 'have' emotions, and that 'being emotional' gains its own agency, impacting in a variety of ways on the communicative situation. l This can take place extralinguistically (e.g. by facial expressions, body postures, proximity, and the like), in terms of suprasegmentational and prosodic features, and in terms of linguistic (lexical and syntactic) forms, A recent collection of articles in a special issue of the

Between the thin lines of psychology, philosophy and end even cognitive linguistics, neurology, neuroanthropology and robotics, the concept of embodied cognition 1 has received a lot of attention in recent research. From the perspective of grounded cognition, our perception and concepts of the world are deeply connected to our bodily experiences, our tastes, color, texture, shape, and even fear and anger. Against a Cartesian duality, the notion of embodiment denotes a unified, close relation between brain functions and the body. Contrary to the early modal theories rendering that emotions are not separate from cognition, the emergence of embodied cognition posits that our perception and understanding of emotions is closely related to our physical experiences. Recent views in the field of cognitive linguistics, and especially cognitive semantics, place embodiment at the center of importance for "mind" sciences, as language meanings are "embodied" and thus expressed between interlocutors through their bodily experiences . The importance of embodiment and sensory-motor functions is further highlighted in terms of creating a link between high and low cognition, namely perception and language processing and comprehension respectively, as the latter stimulates the motor system (Jirak et al, 2010). Simply put, from the perspective of cognitive science, embodiment is defined as the influence of the body on language and thought, and generally, on the mind .

How do language and communicative practices shape emotional experience? What are emotions and how can we study them ethnographically? How do our everyday ways of interacting create emotional meaning? This course focuses on the role of language and communicative dynamics in mediating and shaping emotional experience. Since the early 1990s, influential works in linguistic and cultural anthropology have questioned universalizing views of emotion, advocating the idea that emotions are linguistic and sociocultural constructs grounded in historical and local specific contexts. These studies have challenged approaches to emotions based on binary oppositions (i.e. mind versus body and emotion versus reason), as reflected for example in popular and scholarly tendencies of associating emotions with stereotypical images of femininity, seen in opposition and hierarchical relations to reason (or rationality). Another line of research has explored the co-articulation between the linguistic expression of emotions and the process of subject- formation, highlighting how certain ways of speaking may generate or challenge moral dispositions, domains of experience, and structures of feelings. Throughout the semester students will engage a series of ethnographic case studies aimed at exploring the nexus between language, emotions, and everyday cultural practices. Ranging from the relation between ideologies of gender and linguistic styles of affective expression in the Pacific to the intersection between romantic love, marriage practices, and the development of literacy in Nepal; from the connection between emotional ethos and styles of religious devotion in Indonesia and Mexico to the poetic expressions of resistance in Egypt and Nigeria; and from the analysis of the emotion in doctor-patient interactions to the study of dynamics of popularity and exclusion among American teenagers, this course will explore the linguistic constitution of emotional experience and subjectivity. Our aim will be to explore the linguistic poetics of emotions and the cultural politics of affect to expand our understanding of the significance of language in shaping our world.

Consciousness & Emotion Book Series, 2012

The relevance of emotion for language and linguistics is considered from three perspectives: (a) the conceptualization of emotions, (b) the expression of emotions and (c) the grounding of language. As to the conceptualization perspective, research on the emotional lexicon is discussed. Not only content words (N, V, A), but also prepositions are relevant (to long for, hate against). From the expression perspective, it is claimed that the expression of emotions takes place on all linguistic levels: phonological, morphological, lexical, syntactic, and on the level of figurative language use (metaphor and metonymy). 'Grounding' of language in emotion means that emotion is one of the preconditions for the functioning of language (emotion is part of the embodied grounding) and for its coming into existence, both ontogenetically and phylogenetically.

Irvine, Judith T. 1990. "Registering affect: heteroglossia in the linguistic expression of emotion" in Language and the Politics of Emotion, edited by Catherine A. Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leys, Ruth. 2010. "How Did Fear Become a Scientific Object and What Kind of Object Is It?" Representations 110:66-104. Massumi, Brian. 2005. "Fear (The Spectrum Said)." positions 13:31-48.

Affective Science

What is the relationship between language and emotion? The work that fills the pages of this special issue draws from interdisciplinary domains to weigh in on the relationship between language and emotion in semantics, cross-linguistic experience, development, emotion perception, emotion experience and regulation, and neural representation. These important new findings chart an exciting path forward for future basic and translational work in affective science.

Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2009

This chapter summarises research techniques and findings in the contrastive lexical semantics of emotion vocabulary. As a systematic and language-neutral methodology, the chapter employs the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach, which depicts meanings as substitutable paraphrases composed of simple, cross-translatable words. In broad agreement with many emotion theorists, the NSM approach sees emotion concepts as “blends” of feelings and thoughts, sometimes accompanied by potential bodily reactions. Using examples from English and German, the chapter summarises findings about semantic templates and semantic components of various kinds of emotion terms, including adjectives (e.g. ‘afraid’, ‘angry’, ‘ashamed’), verbs (e.g. ‘miss’, ‘worry’), and abstract nouns (e.g. ‘happiness’, ‘depression’). Minor categories and examples from other, non-European, languages are also briefly considered. It is shown that it is both possible and necessary to differentiate between similar-but different emotion concepts in a single language, e.g. English ‘happy’, ‘pleased’, ‘satisfied’, and across different languages, e.g. English ‘disgust’ vs. German ‘Ekel’. Likewise, using English ‘happy’ and ‘happiness’ as examples, it is shown that the “same” word can vary in its meaning across time. Considerable weight is placed on linguistic evidence, such as usage patterns, collocational data, and phraseology. In short, the chapter delineates the semantic fundamentals of emotion vocabulary, demonstrates a framework for fine-grained contrastive analysis, and emphasises the greater-than-expected semantic variability across languages, epochs, and cultures.

2010