Emotions in Crosslinguistic Perspective

✍ Scribed by Jean Harkins (editor); Anna Wierzbicka (editor)

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2001
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 428
• Series: Cognitive Linguistics Research [CLR]; 17
• Edition: Reprint 2010
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This volume aims to enrich the current interdisciplinary theoretical discussion of human emo-tions by presenting studies based on extensive linguistic data from a wide range of languages of the world. Each language-specific study gives detailed semantic descriptions of the meanings of culturally salient emotion words and expressions, offering fascinating insights into people's emotional lives in diverse cultures including Amharic, Chinese, German, Japanese, Lao, Malay, Mbula, Polish and Russian.

The book is unique in its emphasis on empirical language data, analyzed in a framework free of ethnocentrism and not dependent upon English emotion terms, but relying instead on independently established conceptual universals. Students of languages and cultures, psychology and cognition will find this volume a rich resource of description and analysis of emotional meanings in cultural context.

✦ Table of Contents

Introduction
Testing emotional universals in Amharic
Emotions and the nature of persons in Mbula
Why Germans don't feel “anger”
Linguistic evidence for a Lao perspective on facial expression of emotion
Hati: A key word in the Malay vocabulary of emotion
Talking about anger in Central Australia
Meanings of Japanese sound-symbolic emotion words
Concepts of anger in Chinese
Human emotions viewed through the Russian language
A culturally salient Polish emotion: Przykro (pron. pshickro)
An inquiry into “sadness” in Chinese
Subject and name index
Words and phrases index