Language and Emotion Concepts

Description

Essen: LAUD 1995 (2nd ed. with divergent page numbering 2007). Paper No. 350 — 14 p.This is a necessarily biased survey of and introduction to the study of the language of emotion that is not intended to substitute for such excellent surveys as those by Besnier (1990) and Russell (1991). It is merely hoped that it will complement them in some ways. This is a personal account, and it is likely that others working in the field would come up with (perhaps sometimes very) different accounts for the phenomenon under investigation in this part of the present volume: the study of the language used about the emotions and what that language tells us about emotion concepts. Nevertheless, I hope that the survey will help the interested reader understand and appreciate the ideas and approaches represented in this part of the book. I will not discuss grammatical aspects of emotion concepts (but see Wierzbicka, this volume). The survey is divided into three sections: (1) words and emotion, (2) meaning and emotion, and (3) some issues that inevitably arise in the study of everyday conceptions of emotion.