| Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools. |
Language is PowerfulDepartment of Psychology, Boston College, USA, lindqukr{at}bc.edu As Wierzbicka suggests in her recent review, language is powerful in emotion. Wierzbicka's solution is to remove the linguistically relative aspects of emotion concepts, like icing from a cake, to reveal the universal meanings below. In the present commentary, I suggest that language is a more fundamental ingredient in emotion than Wierzbicka's solution assumes; language can be no more removed from emotion, than flour can be removed from an already baked cake. As an alternate solution, I present a constructionist view of emotion, which not only recognizes the role of language in emotion, but also predicts and models its impact as language constitutes emotion experience.
Key Words: culture emotion construction emotion experience linguistic relativity
Emotion Review, Vol. 1, No. 1,
16-18 (2009) |
|||