Harkins, Jean (2001). Talking about anger in Central Australia. In Jean Harkins, & Anna Wierzbicka (Eds.), Emotions in crosslinguistic perspective (pp. 201-220). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9783110880168.197
This exploration of a small group of emotion expressions in the Arrernte language of Central Australia takes the view that it is useful and illuminating, when investigating emotional or other meanings, to cultivate awareness of the cultural and intercultural dimensions of the enterprise, and to see both the processes and outcomes of the investigation in this light. It demonstrates the practicality of the NSM approach in facilitating intercultural discussion and understanding of people’s emotional life and behaviour in cultural context, and, furthermore, as a tool for stating meanings in the language of inquiry.
This small study has found confirmation for several of the hypotheses about emotional meanings put forward by Wierzbicka and other practitioners of the NSM approach to semantic analysis, and has raised some questions about other parts of the theory. There was surprising convergence between the Arrernte perceptions and the NSM picture of emotions as cognitively based feelings. Arrernte anger-like feelings all contain the impulse to act, proposed as a universal of anger-like feelings by Wierzbicka (1999). The Arrernte ayeye akweke did not have the full prototype structure for cognitively based feelings (“sometimes a person thinks…”, etc.) proposed by Wierzbicka (1999). An attempt to apply such a frame rendered the ayeye akweke unintelligible in Arrernte, and it is not entirely clear how this problem could be resolved, or whether it would be appropriate to do so. A simplified frame for practical definitional purposes may be the way to go, as it could very well be the case that the full prototype structure is a little too abstract for workable natural language definitions.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
