Emotion processes in discourse - study of emotions in discourse

● functional, cognitive and social linguistic approaches to discourse analysis, in what is

labeled the ‘emotional turn’, have ceased to ignore the affective functions of
language
● across the social sciences, scholars are recognizing the essential role of emotional
phenomena, promoting interdisciplinarity
○ mind studies
○ social interaction
○ language
● result: better understanding of the psychological, interactional and social processes
triggered by emotions

1. Linguistic approaches to emotion

● emotion has “many faces and phases”, leading to the mysteriousness of the
phenomena
● adoption of a discursive perspective: overall within linguistics, entailing a
functional approach
● approach enriched with perspectives from language, neurology, psychology,
philosophy - given the complexity of human emotion, we strongly believe that it could
not be otherwise
● Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio (2018) - emotions have been neglected in
science for a long time, despite their omnipresence in all aspects of human life
○ consider emotions as instruments and motivators for culture
○ the entire life of intellect is embedded in affect
● emotional turn - foremost change of paradigm in the humanistic sciences of the 21st
century
○ Language is no longer thought to be a totally objective and valid
representation of reality; it is, in contrast, viewed as an intersubjective
expression of correlational ‘truth’, where the expression of emotion plays a
fundamental part (Lüdtke 2015)
● 1872 - The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Charles Darwin
○ foundations for later, more robust theories on the existence and nature of
emotions in animals
○ emotions serve a communicative function in both human beings and animals,
and their expression (verbal or non-verbal) constitutes an outward
communication of an inner state
○ Human beings can consciously express and talk about their emotions in very
sophisticated ways, that go beyond the instinctive animal expression
● emotion talk/ emotional talk - «ouch!»/ «I feel pain»
○ emotion talk - descriptive (truth-conditional/propositional) content
○ emotional talk - expressive (non-truth-conditional/non-propositional) content
○ note: the distinction between emotion talk and emotional talk (the former
conveying a kind of meaning closer to Kaplan’s descriptive meaning and the
latter to his expressive meaning) is not so clear-cut
● diverse fields of linguistics are trying to characterize and understand emotion -
cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, linguistic anthropology and conversation
analysis, and as we know, functional linguistics
 ○ cognitive linguistics - emotion as a (cognitive) system of knowledge that
interacts with language
○ Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) - emotions as a subsystem of
language which is completely attached to, and dependent on, evaluation
systems
○ SFL-oriented Appraisal Theory - , emotion is found in the subsystem of Affect
within the superordinate system of ATTITUDE, limiting the emotion of the
evaluative capacity of this affect’s type of evaluation
● Alba-Juez & Thompson - emotion as a dynamical subsystem of language,
permeating all linguistic levels and involving the expression of the speaker’s or
writer’s attitude or stance towards, viewpoint on, or feelings about the entities or
propositions that s/he is talking about - linguistic levels: morphological, phonological,
syntactic, lexical, semantic and pragmatic
○ lexical level: words have not only conceptual meaning but also evaluative and
expressive meaning, allowing them to be positive, negative, or mixed
■ The affective component of words influences the earliest aspects of
language processing, modulating how deeply meaning is processed
■ the emotional associations attributed to most words in a given social
group or culture tend to be the same for different people
■ for certain individuals some words may have a specific valence which
does not coincide with the general feeling of the other members of
their discourse system, community or culture
○ phonological level: emotion can be expressed through the management and
use of non-segmental, prosodic features (e.g. creaky voice, high pitch, etc.),
and even by the strategic use of one phoneme or another
○ semantic level: emotions are often conceptualized in the form of metaphors,
and consequently it is not uncommon to find emotional metaphors such as
She was boiling with anger (where anger is seen as a fluid in a container) or
He has cold feet (which shows the expressive value of metonymy)
○ pragmatic level: the expression and interpretation of emotion is an
intersubjective phenomenon
● close relationship between evaluation and emotion: most definitions, from both
cognitive and functional linguistics, or from other fields like psychology,4 seem to
acknowledge explicitly or implicitly that there is a tight relationship between these two
phenomena

1.2 Emotion as a discourse-pragmatic phenomenon

● The comprehension of the emotion encoded in a given text or discourse would be
incomplete if we only looked into the valence of words, the affective affixes used, or
the emotive syntactic constructions - multimodal analysis
● Schwarz-Friesel - emotions can be expressed on three different levels:
○ detectable bodily symptoms (trembling, blushing, etc.)
○ non-verbal expressions (gestures, laughter, etc.)
○ verbally, through intonation, interjections, affective words, expressive speech
acts, emotional metaphors, emotional implicatures, etc
● to analyze and comprehend a given discourse in its whole emotional potential, we
should also look into its macrostructure and the different types of context that are
affecting the knowledge that is shared ‒ or not ‒ by the interlocutors
● expectations of both speaker and hearer as a crucial component of pragmemes
○ pragmemes - “a generalized pragmatic act, characterizing a general
situational prototype, capable of being executed in the situation”.
○ situation - the place where the linguistic interactants meet, not as
disembodied ‘talking heads’, but as agents on the societal scene, bringing
along their entire baggage of world knowledge: tacit and explicit
presuppositions, expectations, and prejudices, as well as prior linguistic and
world experiences. (Mey 2010: 2883)
● Summerfield & Egner on «expectation»: “brain states that reflect prior information
about what is possible or probable in the forthcoming sensory environment”
● Escandell-Vidal on «expectation» - “expectations are the cognitive, internalized
image of the general prototype for each situation” and “they lie at the heart of what
we perceive as normal, ‘smooth interaction’
● the expectation has to be understood in pair with emotional implicature - a kind
of implicature about the emotions of the speaker that is based to a certain degree on
culturally shaped encyclopedic knowledge
● Expectations are also inextricably associated with the pragmatic concept of
(im)politeness: Intensifying or preventing positive or negative effects requires the
anticipation and prediction of expected consequences to what is said or implicated.
And in so doing, speakers at the same time unavoidably have to consider their
emotional relationship with their interlocutors and weigh their possible emotional
reactions
○ the adaptation of one’s behavior to the social circumstances and the
macro-structure of discourse (in this case, a talk in a political campaign)
involves
■ evaluative ability to calculate the possible effects of one’s utterances
■ capacity to adapt to the emotional context of the situation
■ result: extraction of the main generalized pragmatic speech act, or
better, pragmeme
● e-implicatures are not the only kind of inference that can have affective
meaning: particular linguistic structures, such as CTR (Creative Total
Reduplication), i.e. the intentional and immediate repetition of a word (e.g. “It’s a little
little cat” 2015: 351), which, in addition to its explicit meaning (‘very little’) conveys an
affective meaning
○ not a conversational but a conventional implicature - this kind of
repetition seems to be conventionalized, at least in english language -
languages are vehicles of the expression of affect, and so the implicature
cannot be canceled
● Another pragmatic phenomenon that very frequently conveys affect is
reference
○ the emotional relationship between two people by paying attention to the way
in which these two people refer to or address each other
○ the way we refer to others also generates certain expectations on the part of
our interlocutors regarding the feelings we may have for those people
● As long as the expectations related to an emotional situation are fulfilled, the
participants’ behavior will go unnoticed and will be accepted as appropriate
 ○ when the participants do not share the same set of expectations about their
emotional behavior related to a situation, it is very probable that both parties
will judge the other’s discourse as inadequate or inappropriate
● discourse analyst interest on the study of emotions in narrative
○ understanding the emotional significance of events in narrative is crucial for
allowing us to overhear the characters’ motivations and thought processes, as
well as to identify the key plot moments
○ due to the existence of very tight links between emotion systems and
language processing systems
● importance of emotion in everyday conversation: “the expressions of basic
emotions ‘erupt’ in speech, often involuntarily, as one of the neurophysiological
consequences of experiencing the emotion by the ‘sender’ or encoder of the
expression”

2. Emotion processes in discourse: towards a definition

2.1 The terms used
● Batson, Shaw & Oleson: in psychology, the terms affect, mood and emotion are
most often used interchangeably. However, this is not totally accurate
○ affect - “the primary motivational system” (an innate biological mechanism)
○ feeling - conscious awareness of an affect
○ emotion - combination of an affect, a feeling and memory of previous
experiences of the initiating affect
○ mood - persistent state of emotion
● Neuroscientist Damasio
○ emotions: “complex … automated programs of actions concocted by
evolution” triggered by external stimuli related to the exteroceptive senses
(vision, hearing, taste and smell) and are instinctual, i.e. biologically preset
○ feeling: “composite perceptions of what happens in our body and mind when
we are emoting”
● Scholars in both linguistics and psychology support (explicitly or implicitly) the idea
that the emotions people feel and/or express are predictable from their appraisal of
their circumstances and conversely, their interpretation of the situation is predictable
on the basis of their emotional expression or behavior
● Wetherell - “[c]onventional psychological research on emotions is too narrow and
restrictive to support all the things social research could do in this area»
○ affective practice - most promising way forward to “put together integrated
readings of the somatic, discursive, situated, historical, social, psychological
and cultural bases of affectivity” - affects: embodied meaning making
● conclusion: there is no consensus among scholars from different fields ‒ or even
within the same field of knowledge as to the terms used and how to define them

2.2 Emotion as state or as process?

● affect can be conceptualized in two ways:
○ psychology and neuroscience: affect as an elemental state
■ set of basic, universal human emotions which are produced by an
innate hardwired neuromotor program
○ philosophy and the humanities: affect as an intensive force
 ■ emotion as a process which postulate that emotions are composed of
simpler but still meaningful elements that correspond to appraisals
and their correlates, and view emotional experience as a rapidly or
sometimes gradually changing process, according as additions or
revisions of the appraisals are made - more profitable approach

2.3 Our approach to emotion in discourse

● emotion as a function that speakers fulfill in discourse
● the emotive function, like the evaluative function, is a function of a number of
variables that interact with one another
● dynamical system of language, and as such, we see it as a process and not as a
state
○ features and variables that contribute to the expression of the emotion at
both the production and reception ends
■ appraisal of the situation
■ the expectations related to the emotions felt by the speaker and
perceived or caused in the hearer or audience
■ the common-ground knowledge of the interlocutors
■ the gestures or emotive bodily behavior (e.g. crying, gasping,
blushing, etc.)
■ the polarity or valence of the emotion, etc
● what does emotion being a process implies: different stages and facets that in
discourse are better described as systems or ‘bundles’
● emotion systems display the prototypical ‘cycle state’ of pragmatic dynamical
systems involving the interaction between brains (cognition), bodies (bodily and
verbal behavior) and the environment (context)
● psychiatric and linguistic conciliation- emotions always have an evaluative
component, but evaluations do not necessarily have to have a ‘purely’ emotional
component
● conservative approach - functions that may be fulfilled at the same time, being tightly
attached , but they may manifest in different ways
○ when we talk about appraisal, we are focusing on those utterances or that
discourse whose main function is an evaluative one
○ when we talk about emotion, we focus on discourse whose main function is
an expressive one

2.3.1 Our definition

● emotion as a (dynamical) system of language which interacts with the system of
evaluation but whose main function is the expression of the speaker’s feelings, mood
or affective experience
● multimodal discourse process, which permeates all linguistic levels but also
manifests itself in non-verbal ways, presenting different stages and forms (influenced
by variables such as pragmatic expectations or common-ground knowledge)
according as the discursive situation and interaction changes and evolves