к.ф.н., доцент Шингарева М.Ю., магистрант Байдабекова М.

Региональный социально-инновационный университет

A Linguistics Approach to Emotions Study

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] "emotive". 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. 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.

In numerous articles, chapters and books Wierzbicka has explicated her theoretical stance on how to analyze emotions. Emotions to her are a semantic domain [1, p.235], to be investigated in a semantic metalanguage, i.e. in terms of indefinables or primitives (semantic universals) that are shared by all human languages. These universals are of a conceptual nature and comprise elements such as feel, want, say, think, know, good, bad, and so on. It is Wierzbicka's declared aim "to explore human emotions (or any other conceptual domain) from a universal, language-independent perspective" [1, p. 236].

In her comparative study of language-dependent conceptualizations, Wierzbicka is able to document that "every language imposes its own classification upon human emotional experiences, and English words such as anger or sadness are cultural artifacts of the English language, not culture-free analytical tools" [1, p. 236].

Harré's suggestion that researchers study "the way people use their emotion vocabulary, in commenting upon, describing, and reprimanding people for emotional displays and feelings" [2, p. 148], is in many ways similar to Wierzbicka's approach. In aiming to pull out of the uses of the emotion vocabulary (of a given culture at a given time) the underlying "theory of emotion", Harré and Gillett follow Stearns and Stearns' theory of "emotionology". In contrast to the universal orientation of Wierzbicka, an emotionology is a very local theory (and taxonomy), which is said to consist of four general features. These features need close attention if an emotion is to be identified and labeled correctly:

(1) a felt bodily disturbance,

(2) a characteristic display,

(3) the expression of a judgment, and

(4) a particular illocutionary force.

In a number of publications spanning over at least the last two decades, Nancy Stein and her associates have been investigating the cognitive capacity to simulate the plans and goals relevant to the understanding of (human) actions as part of the study of personal and social behavior. In this approach, knowledge of goals and plans is assumed to be the basic prerequisite to make sense of others, and it figures in the same capacity in explaining and reasoning about one's own actions, i.e. in the process of making sense of one's own self. Stein's original research in children's understanding of human intentionality in their story constructs has recently moved focus more strongly on the appraisal processes relevant to assessing the specific goals, values, and moral principles involved in the understanding of characters' actions. And since knowledge about valued goals and their outcomes is taken to be heavily influential on how characters 'feel' and how they (con-sequentially) react, a model has emerged that is argued to capture the "meaning of emotions", i.e. it can spell out the appraisal processes that link the occurrence of a situation to an emotion (and potential subsequent reactions), and delineate the nature and boundaries between emotions [3].

Making use of a particular narrative interview technique, labelled the "on-line interview", individuals are continually monitored in their reporting of an emotional experience with regard to the status of their goals and valued preferences. Since it is assumed that goals and action plans undergo changes within actual emotional experiences, this technique is supposed to tap these changes and thus facilitate to get 'beyond' the report of the experience . [3].

Thus, while Wierzbicka views emotions as a semantic [= conceptual] domain which governs the patterns of discourse, and Harré takes emotions to be part of the domain of statements (= actions and interactions), Stein's approach to emotions - to a degree at least - seems to combine aspects of both: Emotions are schematically organized, i.e. part of a representational system, and these schemata are 'put to work' in responses to emotional events in the form of being angry or doing metagu. However, they first of all are cognitions, constituting the motivational force for individuals to (re)act in a certain manner. It should be noted that the "goal-action-outcome" theory claims to be able to account for cultural (and individual) variations by decomposing the general intentional states into distinct components which can be filled in and arranged in culturally variable ways.

When, as in Stein's approach, emotions are approached as a representational system of some specific goal-plan-outcome knowledge, then the acquisition of categorial distinctions between the (basic as well as culture-specific) emotions consists in its most basic form of knowledge of intentional action and of goal plans. According to Stein and her associates, these two knowledge types are acquired relatively early, at around three years of age. At this point, children can successfully differentiate the components that lead to (English) anger, sadness, fear, and happiness and efforts have concentrated on illustrating how children make use of this knowledge in later years in other problem solving tasks. Using narratives of real life (emotional) situations and subjecting them to on-line questions for on-line reasoning, Stein and her colleagues rely on language in its ideational, representational function, as a relatively transparent window to what the narrator means when talking about emotions. The content of the topic is taken as what is of basic concern, and whether the narrator wants to be understood as blaming another person or saving face, i.e. the directive force of language use [= the interpersonal function], is not considered of immediate relevance. Similarly, the directive force of culture in the form of rules and norms for conduct only becomes relevant as a 'secondary' force, i.e. by way of individually represented cognitive systems, containing information about individual experiences and culturally shared knowledge.

Within the framework chosen by Wierzbicka, language should obviously play a much more important role, since her system of universals is labelled 'semantic primitives', which, however, in their very nature are considered conceptual [= cognitive]. Although, to the best of my knowledge, Wierzbicka did not investigate how these semantic/cognitive universals are acquired, there are two options: Option number one consists of a nativist/maturational solution. Accordingly, we bring the set of culture-independent universals to the process of cognitive development, and out of these, the child has to narrow down the options that are chosen by the specific culture and "encoded" by the specific language in specific linguistic (lexical) forms. Option number two would argue the other way around: The set of universals is 'learned' by way of abstracting them from the language specific forms (and their local meanings) which are learnt first. According to this version a culture-independent language could be the product of a reflective learning process that operates on top of a first language, that is after having developed a more detached position from one's own culture and language use. Although I would be leaning toward this version, Wierzbicka seems to strongly favor the assumption that the universals are innate [1], particularly, since version two would downgrade her set of universals to linguistic constructs which are borne out of their own set of cultural practices and linguistic ideologies. In other words, the desire of transcending one's own culture and language practices would have to be viewed as rooted in particular cultural practices, and as such can never become "objective" or in its absolute sense "culture-independent".

Harré's discursive approach to emotions takes up on some of the more interesting aspects of Stein's and Wierzbicka's proposals and tries to carry them one step further. In keeping with the anthropological, cultural model approaches, Harré's emotionology adds the directive, cultural force of emotions to the representational system, i.e. the information about structure of experience (= shared knowledge). This opens up space for investigations of the processes through which cultural knowledge obtains motivational force for individuals. However, the knowledge of scripts is not viewed to be organized in terms of taxonomic structures, as in the early days of cognitive anthropology, and neither is culture a monolithic unit. Cultural meanings are potentially conflicting and more loosely organized. At the same time, Harré's leaning to view emotions (as all other psychological processes) as products of discourse, constituted in interaction, forces a new emphasis on the study of emotions which is more thoroughly discourse oriented. With regard to the question of how emotions are acquired, we are pushed to look for a form of cultural learning that can incorporate aspects of Stein's and Wierzbicka's cognitive approaches under the auspices of a discursive orientation.

Bibliography:

1. Wierzbicka, A. (1995a). Emotion and facial expression: A semantic perspective. Culture and Psychology, 1:227-258.

2. Harré, R., & Gillett, G. (1994). The Discursive Mind. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

3. Stein, N.L., Trabasso, T. & Liwag, M. (1994). The Rashomon phenomenon: The role of framing and future- orientation in memories for emotional events. In M.M. Haith, J.B. Benson, R.J. Roberts, Jr., & B.F. Pennington (Eds.), The Development of future oriented processes. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.