Romero-Trillo, Jesús & Avila-Ledesma, Nancy E. (2017). The ethnopragmatic representation of positive and negative emotions in Irish immigrants’ letters. In Keith Allan, Alessandro Capone & Istvan Kecskes (Eds.), Pragmemes and theories of language use (pp. 393-420). Cham: Springer.
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-43491-9_21
Abstract:
This chapter explores the ethnopragmatic conceptualization of happiness and sadness in the language of the Irish citizens who immigrated to North America between 1811 and 1880, on the basis of a corpus of Irish emigrants’ personal correspondence. In particular, this study proposes a Natural Semantic Metalanguage examination of the emotional load of the positive adjectives happy and glad, and their negative counterparts, unhappy and sad, to elucidate Irish emigrants’ psychological states of mind and emotional responses to transatlantic migrations and life abroad. It investigates the pragmatic uses of key emotion terms in the corpus based upon the semantic explications developed by Wierzbicka and adds to these an explication of the adjective glad. It is shown that the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) framework can be fruitfully used as an analytic tool to unveil the linguistic specificities embedded in the conceptualization of psychological acts such as emotions.
Rating:
Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
