WA Friday Lunch Talks are monthly meetings with presentations of current research results or research in progress by WA faculty, staff, or PhD students. Each talk is of 45 minutes (+15 minutes for discussion). We welcome all to a talk ONLINE (MS Teams Lecture) "By any other name – how we speak emotions and feel words" by dr Halszka Bąk (Friday, April 24, 13:15-14:15).
dr Halszka Bąk
Department of Pragmatics of English
By any other name – how we speak emotions and feel words
When a Pole says they are "wściekły/a", does the word carry the same emotional meaning as "enraged" for an American? There is a respectable body of research on broad affective states expressed through language. However, research on more complex psychosomatic states like basic emotions in language has been lacking. Here I will present the preliminary results of a systematic comparison of how the theoretically universal basic emotions are conceptualized and lexicalized in Polish and English. Universal basic emotions as postulated by Paul Ekman include: fear, anger, disgust, sadness, surprise, and joy. I compiled a database of all those words and their synonyms in noun, verb, and adjective form in English. I compiled another database on the same principles using translation equivalents of the six basic emotions in Polish. Native speakers of English and Polish were then invited to provide key evaluations of valence (how positive/negative each emotion is), arousal (how intense it is), and dominance (how well it can be controlled) for all the words in their native languages. I found significant differences in how basic emotions were conceptualized between the two languages. On the level of lexical analysis English emotion lexicon is three times the size of Polish. On the functional level, basic emotions, especially anger and fear are preferentially expressed as verbs in English, whereas Polish favors nouns. Affectively, Poles conceptualize all basic emotions as more subjectively intense than English-speaking Americans do. Finally, I found marked differences in how male and female speakers of Polish and English conceptualize emotions. The main objective of this research project has been to compile databases of emotion terms for future use in research. However, the observations based on these compilations already seem to carry important implications for the base assumptions in emotion research, bilingualism studies, and psychotherapy.
Research Grant SONATA 13, Ref. No. 2017/26/D/HS6/00035
Basic Emotion Terms Catalogue – Polish & English
JOINING THE TALK via MS Teams:
Group: WA Friday Lunch Talk (04/24, Bąk)
e-mail from your University account to hbak@wa.amu.edu.pl by 23rd April by 8:00pm to request being added
or join with a code: wg1h07p