Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dlnhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T20:55:01.129Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Emotion and emotionality as a hidden dimension of lexicon and discourse

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2008

ÅKE VIBERG
ÅKE VIBERG*
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics and Philology, Uppsala University, Box 635, SE-751 26 Uppsala, [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In her thought-provoking article, Aneta Pavlenko approaches emotion and emotion-laden words in the bilingual lexicon from an impressive number of different perspectives. This is particularly welcome, since most models of linguistic structure do not account for emotional meanings in a systematic way. One exception worth mentioning, however, is Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL; Halliday, 1985/1994) with its broad division of functions into the textual, ideational and interpersonal metafunctions. Whereas the textual metafunction is concerned with the flow of information and the ideational with the construction of experience, the interpersonal function is concerned with interaction between people including the sharing of feelings. Recently, this last aspect has been developed more on the basis of SFL within Appraisal theory (Martin and White 2005), where attitudinal meanings are divided into Affect (the construal of emotion into the frame I feel (very) __), Judgment (social/moral evaluation of people) and Appreciation (aesthetic evaluation of things). The theory has primarily been applied to the development of the expression of feeling and evaluation in student writing in schools, based on qualitative analysis of corpora. The framework has also recently been applied to other languages than English as in Folkeryd (2006), who shows how the expression of affect and other evaluative resources are used in various story genres by Swedish students in grades 5, 8 and 11. The expression of attitudinal meanings turned out to be a problem characteristic of low-achieving students. This study includes bilingual students but they are not focused on in the published work.

Type
Peer Commentaries
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , July 2008 , pp. 189 - 191
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Folkeryd, J. (2006). Writing with an attitude: Appraisal and student texts in the school subject of Swedish. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Uppsala. http://publications.uu.se/theses/abstract.xsql?dbid=7410 (10 March 2007). [Acta Universitatis Uppsaliensis. Studia Linguistica Upsaliensia 5.]Google Scholar
Halliday, M. A. K. (1985/1994). An introduction to functional grammar. London: Edward Arnold.Google Scholar
Martin, J. R. & White, P. R. R. (2005). The language of evaluation: Appraisal in English. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McEnery, T., Xiao, R. & Tono, Y. (2006). Corpus-based language studies: An advanced resource book. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Niedenthal, P., Auxiette, C., Nugier, A., Dalle, N., Bonin, P. & Fayol, M. (2004). A prototype analysis of the French category “emotion”. Cognition and Emotion, 18 (3), 289–312.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Slobin, D. (2003). Language and thought online: Cognitive consequences of linguistic relativity. In Gentner, D. & Goldin-Meadow, S. (eds.), Language in mind: Advances in the study of language and thought, pp. 157–191. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Snell-Hornby, M. (1983). Verb-descriptivity in German and English. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag.Google Scholar
Stubbs, M. (2001). Words and phrases: Corpus studies of lexical semantics. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Viberg, Å. (1984). The verbs of perception: A typological study. Linguistics, 21 (1), 123–162.Google Scholar
Viberg, Å. (1999). Polysemy and differentiation in the lexicon: Verbs of physical contact in Swedish. In Allwood, J. & Gärdenfors, P. (eds.), Cognitive semantics: Meaning and cognition, pp. 87–129. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Viberg, Å. (2001). Age-related and L2-related features in bilingual narrative development. In Verhoeven, L. & Strömqvist, S. (eds.), Narrative development in a multilingual context, pp. 87–128. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Viberg, Å. (2004). Physical contact verbs in English and Swedish from the perspective of crosslinguistic lexicology. In Aijmer, K. & Altenberg, B. (eds.), Advances in corpus linguistics, pp. 327–352. Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Viberg, Å. (2005). The lexical typological profile of Swedish mental verbs. Languages in Contrast, 5 (1), 121–157.CrossRefGoogle Scholar