Linguistics—The Great Absentee

Abstract

Throughout the history of emotion research psychologists have been deeply uncomfortable with the idea that language may have a significant influence on emotion processing. The discomfort came largely from the long antagonism toward the anthropological principle of linguistic relativity. However, the conspicuous lack of competent and meaningful linguistic expertise in psycholinguistic research on emotions was also partially the result of the Chomskyan Revolution in mainstream linguistics, which turned it away from applied approaches. Thus psychologists felt no need to delve into language of emotions because for them emotions were primarily nonverbal phenomena and linguists were largely focused on arguments over finer points of Universal Grammar. Still, a few fields in applied linguistics continued to grow, develop new theories and tools which have a wide application in all subjects pertaining especially to word meanings, their use and functional distributions. These fields are semiotics, semantics, lexicography, corpus linguistics, and pragmatics. Although none of these disciplines are dedicated to investigating the language of emotions, they can be applied to such enterprise. This chapter focuses on the way these disciplines of applied linguistics can complement emotion research and allow for a rigorous and systematic research of the language of emotions.