Athanasiadou Angeliki, Tabakowska Elżbieta (Editors). Speaking of Emotions: Conceptualisation and Expression

Mouton de Gruyter, 1998. — xxi, 444 pages. — (Cognitive Linguistics Research). — ISBN: 3-11-015767-5.As the texts included in this volume show (as well as other recent contributions to emotionology), the actual labels for emotions are only the beginning of the whole story. The dialectal opposition between the universal and the specific involves the opposition between conceptualisations based on real facts (e.g. the actual physiological symptoms or observable forms of behaviour) and those based on people's ideas about the world (e.g. the heart or the liver being the seat of emotions, the role of good and evil spirits in human life, etc.). As confirmed by empirical analyses, even the former need not be universal: while the physiological background as such may well be universal for all human beings, the actual choice of its elements for conceptualisation, and subsequent expression, need not be. As a rule, this choice involves particular linguistic, that is cultural, conventions. However, conceptual differences are mostly the matter of a wide context, both cultural and historical, which conditions the way in which people conceptualise the world around them.It is the affinities and the contrasts that actually tell us most about the nature of human emotions, and about the way in which human beings tend to express them. But it is a multifaceted picture. It is its complexity, and its caleidoscopic nature, that the present volume aims to illustrate.The volume is divided into three parts:The conceptualisation of emotions across cultures: national character through time.
Different approaches to basic emotions: anger and fear.
Expressing emotions across languages: grammar and discourse.The conceptualisation of emotions across cultures: national character through time
"Sadness" and "anger" in Russian: The non-universality of the so-called "basic human emotions"
The cultural dynamics of "national character": The case of the new Russians
Russian "national character" and Russian language: A rejoinder to H. Mondry and J. Taylor
Omoiyari as a core Japanese value: Japanese-style empathy?
Sound symbolic emotion words in Japanese
Cultural variation in the conceptualisation of emotions: A historical study
Different approaches to basic emotions: anger and fear
Are there any emotion-specific metaphors?
The metonymic and metaphorical conceptualisation of anger in Polish
Red dogs and rotten mealies: How Zulus talk about anger
The conceptualisation of the domain of FEAR in Modern Greek
Go to the devil: Some metaphors we curse by
Expressing emotions across languages: grammar and discourse
The conceptualisation of emotional causality by means of prepositional phrases
On emotions that one can "immerse into", "fall into" and "come to": the semantics of a few Russian prepositional constructions
The ideology of honour, respect, and emotion in Tagalog
Vagueness as a euphemistic strategy
The language of emotion: An analysis of Dholuo on the basis of Grace Ogot's novel Miaha
TIRED and EMOTIONAL - On the semantics and pragmatics of emotion verb complementation