Tag: (E) tęsknota

(1986) Emotions

Wierzbicka, Anna (1986). Human emotions: Universal or culture-specific? American Anthropologist, 88(3), 584-594.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1986.88.3.02a00030

Abstract:

The search for ‘fundamental human emotions’ has been seriously impeded by the absence of a culture-independent semantic metalanguage. The author proposes a metalanguage based on a postulated set of universal semantic primitives, and shows how language-specific meanings of emotion terms can be captured and how rigorous cross-cultural comparisons of emotion terms can be achieved.

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A more recent publication building on this one is:

Chapter 3 (pp. 119-134) of Wierzbicka, Anna (1992), Semantics, culture, and cognition: Universal human concepts in culture-specific configurations. New York: Oxford University Press.

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(1995) Japanese, Malay, Polish – Emotion words

Goddard, Cliff (1995). Conceptual and cultural issues in emotion research. Culture & Psychology, 1(2), 289-298. DOI: 10.1177/1354067X9512009

As suggested by its title, Wierzbicka’s 1995 paper ‘Emotion and facial expression: A semantic perspective’ is an attempt to apply a uniform framework for semantic analysis to two domains of emotional expression – words and facial expressions – and to advance some hypotheses about how they are related. Wierzbicka argues that linguistic research shows that no emotion word of English (or any other language) has a simple and undecomposable meaning; rather, the emotion words of different languages encode complex and largely culture-specific perspectives on ‘ways of feeling’, linking feelings with specific kinds of thoughts and wants (prototypical cognitive scenarios). Essentially, the claim is that the meanings of words like angry, proud, lonesome, etc., embody little ‘cultural stories’ about human nature and human interaction. To uncover and state such stories in non-ethnocentric terms, however, requires a framework of semantic universals. We need to go beyond the ‘either-or’ question and seek both the universal core of communication, as well as the precise role of culture. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage is a new method that will assist us to reach that goal.


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