Bi-Annual Conference of the International
Society for Research on Emotion
July 8-10, 2015
What can cognitive grammar tell us about emotions: A constructional model of emotion conceptualization
Benedikt Perak
University of Rijeka
What can cognitive grammar tell us about emotions: A constructional model of emotion conceptualization. The notion of embodiment and componential nature of emotion have been instrumental for the development of
the linguistic research on the intersubjective conceptualization of emotion.
The epistemological implication of the embodied cognition perspective is
that people understand other’s emotion by simulating one’s own comparable embodied affective state (Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia 2008). The componential theories assume an emotion to be conceptualized as a multidimensional process consisting of several components such as bodily changes,
expressive behavior, action tendencies, appraisal, and feeling state that
occur as a response to the specific events in the environment with the aim
of quickly preparing the organism for optimal reaction (Scherer 2003; Barrett 2011; Fontaine, Scherer and Soriano 2013). Based on these theoretical
perspectives, the linguistic communication of emotions involves activation
of comparable embodied affective states via cognitive process of conceptualization that is coded in linguistic constructions. This paper presents a
model of emotion conceptualization that is based on the semantic and
syntactic analysis of 2000 collostructions (Stefanowitsch & Gries 2006) of
the target emotion concepts fear, anger, shame and jealousy in English and
Croatian. The semantic potential of the target concepts is represented as
a network of multidimensional components constructed via the metonymic and metaphoric processes that facilitate activation of the experiential
content of affective state. By mapping relations between neurobiological
mechanisms, cognitive models and symbolic constructions this model reflects the structure of embodied cognition as well as the language-specific
conventionalized patterns of linguistic construal: knowledge of the affective state and knowledge how to conceptualize this affective state in linguistic constructions. Linguistic constructions are hierarchically classified
into sensory-motor, ontological, spatial, thematic and agentive patterns of
conceptualization, that schematically representing emergent structure of
conceptualization. Each new pattern is grounded on the properties of lower
levels, but also presents a new set of semantic and syntactic components
that form emergent properties of that construction. The model demonstrates that properties of emotion concepts do not emerge only from SENSORY-MOTOR components of affective states but also from other cognitive
(and cultural) knowledge about OBJECTS, SPATIAL RELATIONS, EFFECTS OF
PROCESSES / FORCES and AGENTS / INSTRUMENTS that are activated by
respective patterns of language constructions.
www.isre2015.org
www.affective-sciences.org