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Emotion Review-2012-Majid-432-43, artykuły, papers

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//-->Emotion Reviewhttp://emr.sagepub.com/Current Emotion Research in the Language SciencesAsifa MajidEmotion Review2012 4: 432 originally published online 17 July 2012DOI: 10.1177/1754073912445827The online version of this article can be found at:http://emr.sagepub.com/content/4/4/432Published by:http://www.sagepublications.comOn behalf of:International Society for Research on EmotionAdditional services and information forEmotion Reviewcan be found at:Email Alerts:http://emr.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsSubscriptions:http://emr.sagepub.com/subscriptionsReprints:http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navPermissions:http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navCitations:http://emr.sagepub.com/content/4/4/432.refs.html>>Version of Record- Sep 26, 2012OnlineFirst Version of Record- Jul 17, 2012What is This?Downloaded fromemr.sagepub.comby Anna Dom on October 14, 20124458272012EMR4410.1177/1754073912445827MajidEmotionReviewVIEW FROM A DISCIPLINEEmotion ReviewVol. 4, No. 4 (October 2012) 432–443©The Author(s) 2012ISSN 1754-0739DOI: 10.1177/1754073912445827er.sagepub.comCurrent Emotion Research in the LanguageSciencesAsifa MajidMax Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The NetherlandsDonders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behavior, Radboud University, The NetherlandsAbstractWhen researchers think about the interaction between language and emotion, they typically focus on descriptive emotion words.This review demonstrates that emotion can interact with language at many levels of structure, from the sound patterns of alanguage to its lexicon and grammar, and beyond to how it appears in conversation and discourse. Findings are considered fromdiverse subfields across the language sciences, including cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, linguistic anthropology, andconversation analysis. Taken together, it is clear that emotional expression is finely tuned to language-specific structures. Futureemotion research can better exploit cross-linguistic variation to unravel possible universal principles operating between languageand emotion.Keywordscategorization, emotion, language sciences, linguistics, sound-symbolismAccording to a long-standing and dominant view, language is theproduct of an innate, universal, domain-specific and encapsulatedmodule (Chomsky, 1980; Fodor, 1983; Pinker, 1994). In recentyears, there has been a shift away from this perspective andresearchers are questioning many of these fundamentalassumptions (Christiansen & Chater, 2008; Hagoort & VanBerkum, 2007; Langacker, 1987). Increasingly, linguists areengaging with ideas from evolutionary biology to think aboutlanguage evolution and language change (e.g., Dunn, Greenhill,Levinson, & Gray, 2011). This brings to the fore linguisticdiversity, highlighted in a recent article by Evans and Levinson(2009). The idea of a single underlying linguistic system differentonly in surface realization seems increasingly unlikely.If languages are so different from one another then we need tounderstand how and why. This gives prominence to sociolinguisticsand linguistic anthropology. At the same time, there is ever moreinteraction between linguistics and psychology, in particularthrough the subfield of psycholinguistics. As a result, this articlepresents highlights of emotion research from the languagesciences broadly defined, including, where relevant, insights andfindings from these ancillary fields.There are a number of questions regarding the interactionbetween emotion and language, each of which could be asked atdifferent levels of structure, as suggested by Wilce (2009, p. 3),who reasons: “nearly every dimension of every language atleast potentially encodes emotion.” Language is at the nexus ofcognition, on the one hand, and culture on the other. It is private,so intertwined with thought so as to seem inseparable; yet it isalso public, being the medium of communication. Language,then, is the ideal forum to examine the relationship betweenculture and cognition: How is emotion expressed in language?How do cultural forces shape the language of emotion? Doeslanguage in return impact on cognition and culture? Thesecentral questions are not answered in these pages, but I posethem to illustrate the critical role of language in emotionresearch.It is perhaps helpful to unpack further the notion of meaningso as to better understand how emotion might be encoded inlanguage. Linguistic meaning is complex and multifold. Thereis the referential or descriptive aspect of meaning (things inthe world denoted by a linguistic word or form) and theconcomitant intension (the relationships between forms, suchas taxonymy, synonym, etc.). Forms carry connotative meaning,where emotion is not entailed but implied. Expressive meaningconveys the speaker’s feeling or attitude towards the contentof the message, while social meaning indicates somethingabout the speaker’s social role and stance (cf. Cruse, 1986;Lyons, 1977).Author note:Thanks to Disa Sauter, Gunter Senft, Anne Cutler, Wolfgang Klein, and most especially to Kobin Kendrick, Elisabeth Norcliffe, and Jim Russell.Corresponding author:Asifa Majid, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, PO Box 310, 6500 AH, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.Email:asifa.majid@mpi.nlDownloaded fromemr.sagepub.comby Anna Dom on October 14, 2012MajidEmotion in the Language Sciences433These distinctions map (loosely) to the distinctions madewithin psychology between emotion, affect, and attitude (Barrett& Bliss-Moreau, 2009; McGuire, 1969; Russell, 1980). Thedescriptive meaning of emotion words is taken to refer todiscrete states, such as “happiness,” “anger,” and “sadness.”Connotative meaning maps to the general dimensions of arousaland valence. Expressive meaning captures speakers’ attitudes orevaluations about a proposition. Linguists typically focus onone of these aspects to the exclusion of others: Cognitivelinguists, for example, almost exclusively study reference anddiscrete emotions, while linguistic anthropologists focus onsocial meaning and use “affect” as a coverall term (Besnier,1990; Kulick & Schieffelin, 2004). Here, “emotion” is used asthe superordinate term to cover the aforementioned distinctions(cf. Wilce, 2009).This review outlines aspects of linguistic structure whereemotion might reveal itself. More attention is devoted to aspectsof “emotion and language” where previous reviews have beensilent. I only briefly touch on prosody and lexicon. Both theseareas have been reviewed previously, so I do not dwell on them.More space is devoted, instead, to topics such as sound-symbolismand related phenomena (e.g., interjections, ideophones), whichhitherto have been marginalized. As the modular view of languagedwindles, many in the language sciences have shifted fromviewing meaning as amodal and propositional to increasingly“embodied,” and so these topics have become ever moreprominent. I also highlight some aspects of grammar that are littleconsidered in the context of emotion and language. Finally, somerecent studies of emotion in the context of discourse, both innarrative and conversation, are discussed.language. For any one of these speech sound parameters wecould ask whether they are used to signal emotion.ProsodyProsody refers to the “structure that organizes sound”; that is,qualities of speech including pitch, tempo, loudness, and so on(Cutler, Dahan, & Van Donselaar, 1997, p. 142). Speakers raisetheir voices, speak at a higher pitch, and lengthen vowels tosignal a particular emotion or emotional intensity (Goodwin &Goodwin, 2001; Jespersen, 1922; Wilce, 2009). Voice qualities,like harsh, tense, breathy, or whispery, can likewise indicateemotional state (Gobl & Ní Chasaide, 2003). In Zapotec, a lan-guage spoken in Mexico, speakers use different phonation typesto mark different speech registers: Speaking with a high pitchfalsetto indicates respect; using a breathy voice demonstratesauthority; while a creaky voice seeks commiseration (Sicoli,2010). Here, sound features index social roles. Although it hasbeen suggested that speaking louder, at higher pitch, and soforth, heralds greater depth of feeling, in everyday conversationthere are complex cues and dynamics at play, making it unlikelythat loudness, for example, always signals greater intensity(Barth-Weingarten, Reber, & Selting, 2010).Experimental evidence suggests that speakers can recognizediscrete emotions from paralinguistic features across spokenlanguages (e.g., Pell, Monetta, Paulmann, & Kotz, 2009; Pell,Paulmann, Dara, Alasseri, & Kotz, 2009; Scherer, Banse, &Wallbott, 2001; Thompson & Balkwill, 2006) as well as signlanguages (Hietanen, Leppänen, & Lehtonen, 2004; Reilly,Mcintire, & Seago, 1992). For example, Pell, Monetta,Paulmann, & Kotz (2009) played Spanish, English, German,and Arabic recordings of “pseudo-utterances” (i.e., utteranceswithout semantic content) to Spanish participants who had todecide which emotion was being expressed: anger, disgust, fear,sadness, joy, or neutral. Recognition rates by Spanish speakerswere significantly above chance for all four languages. Thisstudy, and the others cited earlier, are suggestive of cross-cultural recognition of specific emotions; but many of thesearticles compare languages that are closely related (typicallyIndo-European languages) or share other linguistic characteris-tics (for example, English and Chinese both have subject verbobject [SVO] word order and are morphologically more ana-lytic; Comrie, 1981). These shared characteristics urge cautionin the face of claims such as “vocal expressions of the emotionsinvestigated [. . .] contain invariant or ‘modal’ elements whichare universally exploited by speakers and can be decoded acrosslanguages irrespective of the linguistic ability and experience ofthe listener” (Pell, Monetta, Paulmann, & Kotz, 2009, p. 116).It is important to consider the relevant cross-linguistic facts.The “same” paralinguistic features can play different rolesacross languages. Take pitch, for example: In English pitch isimplicated in word stress and thus can help disambiguate nounsfrom verbs (e.g., PERmit vs. perMIT), while lexical-tonelanguages use pitch to distinguish between words. Indeed, whenexpressing emotion, pitch is less important in Chinese, a lexicaltone language, and instead speech rate is more relevant (Anolli,SoundsI cannot doubt that language owes its origin to the imitation andmodification, aided by signs and gestures, of various natural sounds, thevoices of other animals, and man’s own distinctive cries [. . .] we mayconclude from a widely spread analogy that this power would have beenespecially exerted during the courtship of the sexes, serving to expressvarious emotions, as love, jealousy, triumph, and serving as a challengeto their rivals. The imitation by articulate sounds of musical cries mighthave given rise to words expressive of various complex emotions.(Darwin, 1871, p. 56)Darwin in this quote points to the close relationship betweenemotion and sound in evolutionary terms, a sentiment echoedby scholars over the years (cf. Christiansen & Kirby, 2003).Regardless of whether emotional expression was the originalimpetus for language evolution or not, we can nevertheless askof the 6,000 or so languages spoken today: Is there evidence fora continuing tight link between speech sounds and emotions? Toanswer this question it is important to distinguish differentaspects of speech sounds. There are the physical parametersrelated to a sound’s acoustic properties: how sound is producedphysiologically and how it is perceived auditorily. Sounds varyin loudness, pitch, duration, length, voice quality, and so forth.In addition, there are those sounds—consonants and vowels—that combine to make meaningful units, such as words, within aDownloaded fromemr.sagepub.comby Anna Dom on October 14, 2012434Emotion Review Vol. 4 No. 4Wang, Mantovani, & De Toni, 2008). Pitch can also signalphrase boundaries, yes–no questions, and other pragmaticinformation. So, a child or second-language learner must learnto parcel out language-specific functions of pitch in order totune into the emotion-relevant ones. This takes time to figureout (Friend, 2000; Quam & Swingley, 2012).One other pertinent detail relating to the aforementionedstudies on emotion and prosody is that they typically use enactedor posed materials. Future research will have to bridge the gapbetween how speakers display emotions in everyday conversationand how they simulate them when told to produce them ondemand in experimental settings. Finally, it is regrettable thatmany studies in this area do not report the language backgroundof their participants; bilingualism is potentially a serious issuefor interpreting results. For reviews of recent literature onemotion and prosody, see Russell, Bachorowski, and Fernández-Dols (2003) and Scherer, Clark-Polner, and Mortillaro (2011).Yimas of Papua New Guinea), the largest 14 (German), with anaverage of six across languages (Maddieson, 2011b).This variation speaks to the essential arbitrariness of sound-meaning associations, suggesting it is implausible that specificsounds are associated with specific emotional meaning.However, there are those that do argue for a tighter link betweensounds and emotions than this standard view holds. The linguistJespersen, for example, argued:Ifgrumblecomes to mean the expression of a mental state ofdissatisfaction, the connection between the sound of the word and itssense is even more direct, for the verb is imitative of the sound producedby such moods, cf.mumbleandgrunt, gruntle.The name of Mrs.Grundyis not badly chosen as a representative of narrow-mindedconventional morality. A long list might be given of symbolic expressionsfor dislike, disgust or scorn. (1922, p. 26, italics in original)Phonetics and PhonologyWhat about phonemes, the vowels and consonants of alanguage? Do these reliably signal specific emotions? Mostlinguists would answer no. The arbitrary relationship betweenthe sound of a word and its meaning is taken to be a definingfeature of language. Human languages exhibit “duality ofpatterning”: meaningless sounds are combined to makemeaningful words (Hockett, 1960).For any language, we can identify those speech soundswhich constitute its phonological inventory; that is, minimalsounds that distinguish between words. For example, /p/ and /b/are two phonemes in English which distinguish the wordspinandbin.Establishing a language’s phonology is not asstraightforward as it initially appears since speakers realize thesame speech sound in different ways. For example, in mostvarieties of English the sound /t/ is pronounced differently whenit is at the beginning of a word (e.g.,top)than when it is in themiddle of word (e.g.,butter),but they are nevertheless the samefrom the perspective of a native English speaker. Intop, tispronounced with a slight burst of air [th] (whereas instopitisn’t). In my native dialect, thetinbutteris pronounced with aglottal stop [ʔ], produced by transiently stopping airflow in thevocal tract. These pronunciation variants are all allophones of/t/, but in another language they could be distinct phonemes intheir own right (as they are, for example, in Hindi). By followinga series of comparisons, a linguist can identify the total set ofphonemes within a language.Across the world, the inventory size of phonemes variesconsiderably: Rotokas (spoken in Papua New Guinea) has onlysix consonants, whereas !Xóõ (spoken in Botswana), at the otherextreme, is reported to have 122 consonants. Like other Khoisanlanguages, !Xóõ utilizes contrasting click sounds as part of itsphonological inventory. On average, languages have a modestinventory of around 20 consonants (Maddieson, 2011a; see alsoRobinson, 2006). Vowels show a smaller range of variation. Thesmallest number of vowels in a language is two (the languageWithin literary studies many have likewise noted correspond-ences between sounds and emotion. Fónagy (1961), for example,compared aggressive and tender poems by the Hungarian poetPetöfi and found that /t/, /k/, and /r/ were more frequent inaggressive poems, while /l/, /m/, and /n/ were more frequent intender poems. Masson (1953), when considering variousEuropean poets, argued that /o/, /l/, /m/, and /w/ suggest liquidity,softness, and coolness. Likewise, Tsur (1992) suggests /l/ is liq-uid, periodic, and soothing. In the last decade or more, there havebeen attempts to test these posited associations statistically. Forexample, Whissell (1999) transcribed poetry, song lyrics, adver-tisements, and various types of popular fiction into a phonemictranscript and then tested whether certain categories of pho-nemes appear more often in particular genres. Independently, shecalculated the emotional tone of each text by averaging thepleasantness and activation scores of words that also appear inthe “Dictionary of Affect in Language” (see Whissell, 1989).Using this procedure, Whissell found a number of associationsbetween categories of phonemes (e.g., bilabial consonants, /m/,/p/, /b/) and emotion (e.g., aggressiveness), through the higherthan chance appearance of those phonemes in certain genres(e.g., Zeppelin lyrics, boy’s advertisements). Using a similarapproach, Whissell (2003) found that texts with more /i/ pho-nemes tend to be more pleasant, while those with /I/ phonemeswere more active.More recently, Auracher, Albers, Zhai, Gareeva, andStavniychuk (2010) tested the cross-cultural validity of theseemotional sound-symbolic associations. Auracher et al. selecteda number of poems from German, Russian, Ukranian, andChinese and calculated the ratio of plosives (e.g., /p/) to nasals(e.g., /n/) in each poem. They then selected the poem with thehighest and lowest ratios in each language and asked nativespeakers to rate those poems on a number of parameters,including happiness, arousal, aggression, and melancholy.Across languages, they found an association between consonantsand emotionality which they state “clearly suggests there is auniversal tendency to express happy and active feelings withplosive sounds, whereas sad and passive feelings are encoded innasal sounds” (Auracher et al., 2010, p. 21).Downloaded fromemr.sagepub.comby Anna Dom on October 14, 2012MajidEmotion in the Language Sciences435In an independent line of inquiry, Zajonc and colleagues(McIntosh, Zajonc, Vig, & Emerick, 1997; Zajonc, Murphy, &Inglehart, 1989) argue that facial feedback whilst producingvowels causes distinct emotion states. They focus, in particular,on the German vowel ü, /y/, which they claim “constricts thenostrils, and pushes the mouth and brows forward, as in a scowl”(McIntosh et al., 1997, p. 177). In a number of studies, Zajoncand colleagues tested Americans and Germans for pleasantnessand mood after uttering the vowel itself or when embeddedmultiple times within a story. In line with their prediction, theyfound that participants had lower pleasantness and moodratings when they produced ü than any other vowel. Overall,these studies point to the same conclusion: There are robustsound–emotion correspondences, which are likely universal.There are, however, a number of problematic points that holdacross these studies. In general, when texts are compared forassociations between sounds and emotions they differ on anumber of parameters, aside from the test phoneme, includinglength, rhyme, frequency of non-critical phonemes, and soforth. These confounding elements make it difficult to interpretthe results unambiguously. In addition, the studies do not takeinto consideration the fact that words do not appear independentlyof each other; rather, when discussing a certain topic, keywordsare likely to reappear, thus inflating calculations of the relativefrequency of letters/phonemes and their likely association withemotions. Where statistical tests have been conducted, they arenumerous with no correction for multiple comparisons.Zajonc et al.’s studies are exemplary in experimental control,but the underlying premise of these studies is highly dubious. Itis claimed that the same muscles involved in the production of/y/, such as the corrugator muscle, are also implicated innegative emotions. However, the only reason articulation of /y/would involve frowning is if participants found it difficult toproduce, which is quite plausible since the participants in thesestudies were either English monolinguals or English–Germanbilinguals. English does not have a phoneme /y/ and Englishspeakers find it notoriously hard to produce. For nativemonolingual Germans, /y/ does not involve the corrugatormuscle, nor does it entail constriction of the nostrils (Von Essen,1979). There has been no test of the greater negativity of ü withnative monolingual speakers of German, so we do not knowwhether the posited sound–emotion association exists.To date, the most convincing study of a possible universalassociation between sounds and emotions has been conductedby Taylor and Taylor (1965). They constructed nonsense wordsin four unrelated languages—English, Japanese, Korean, andTamil—using sounds that were common (as far as possible) toall languages. Monolingual participants then judged the wordsfor pleasantness. The main result of this study was that sound–emotion associations were language-specific: Within a languagecommunity people were consistent in their pleasantness ratingsof sounds, but pleasant sounds were different across languages(see also Iwasaki, Vinson, & Vigliocco, 2007a, 2007b).Other evidence also hints at language-specific sound–meaning pairings. In English, words beginning withgl-,such asglitter, glow, gleam, glisten,and so on, all relate to “vision” and“light”; words beginning withsn-, snore, snarl, snort, sniff,andso on, relate to “nose” and “mouth,” and speakers are sensitiveto this relationship (Bergen, 2004). Frequent English verbs aremore likely to have front vowels, whereas frequent nouns aremore likely to have back vowels; speakers categorize wordsfaster as nouns or verbs if they obey this regularity (Sereno,1994). There may be such regularities in emotion words too:Sneer, leer, jeer,for example, all share the final -eer, and Bergen(2004) proposes -eer means “expression of contempt.” Futurestudies will determine whether speakers are sensitive to thesesorts of language-specific sound–emotion regularities.WordsWhen thinking about “language and emotion,” the lexicon ismost salient; that is, words denoting or referring to emotions,for exampleangry, happy,andsad.Considerable work hasfocused on emotion lexicons, most notably by Wierzbicka andher colleagues (Enfield & Wierzbicka, 2002; Harkins &Wierzbicka, 2001; Wierzbicka, 1996, 1999). Both micro-levelstudies, focusing on specific words (see Ogarkova, in press, forfurther references), and macro-level comparisons of wholelexicons (e.g., Alonso-Arbiol et al., 2006; Moore, Romney,Hsia, & Rusch, 1999; Toivonen et al., 2012) have beenconducted in several languages, using a variety of methods (seeBoster, 2005, for a critical review). Where differences haveemerged, researchers have asked what the concomitantdifferences in non-linguistic cognition might be (Breugelmans& Poortinga, 2006; Sauter, LeGuen, & Haun, 2011; see alsoRoberson, Damjanovic, & Kikutani, 2010). These studies arenot discussed further; instead I focus on emerging trends inemotion lexicon research.InterjectionsInterjections are little words expressing emotional or mentalstates that can stand alone as an utterance and, under usualcircumstances, do not combine to form a construction withother word classes (Ameka, 1992). Examples areWow!, Ah!,Oh!, Gee!,andOops!According to Goffman (1981, p. 99), “Wesee such ‘expression’ as a natural overflowing, a flooding up ofpreviously contained feeling, a bursting of normal restraints, acase of being caught off guard,” or, rather, “[t]hat is what wouldbe learned by asking the man in the street if he uses these formsand, if so, what he means by them.”In a novel study, Sauter, Eisner, Ekman, and Scott (2010)tested whether speakers of Himba, a small-scale speechcommunity resident in Namibia, could recognize vocalexpressions of emotion from speakers of English, resident in theUnited Kingdom, and vice versa. Sauter et al. presentedparticipants with short stories and then asked them to indicatewhich of two vocalizations best fit the story. They foundspeakers were able to assign appropriate vocalizations to stories,even when they came from the non-familiar language. Althoughthe speech sounds were characterized by the authors as “non-verbal,” many could be classified as interjections. In the past,Downloaded fromemr.sagepub.comby Anna Dom on October 14, 2012 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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