Abstract
The present paper focuses on linguistic and culture-bound aspects of the properties of individualism and collectivism through an English-Polish analysis of the emotions shame and guilt. Combining theoretical analyses with the analysis of authentic data, this work breaks new ground in cognitive-based language analysis in its pragmatic setting and attempts to shed new light on complex issues pertaining to cultural identities. The study presents an investigation on language corpus materials of English and Polish and furthermore it enriches the methodology with questionnaire-based (GRID) data of English and Polish, identifying cross-linguistic similarities and differences between the relevant dimensions and components with respect to shame and guilt. The corpus data used in previous studies show a stronger emphasis on self-construal at the individual level of identity with the Polish users, while the English users were presented to attend to a larger extent to the relational self derived from the interactional relations with others . The present study provides strong additional support for a more refined model of both collectivism and individualism and further elaborates on the assumptions of a contrastive analysis of self-conscious emotions.
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Notes
- 1.
The survey was conducted by the Communication Department of Fundación BBVA and is accessible at www.fbbva.es
- 2.
Contextual accounts of actions involving emotion language can be identified both in social psychology literature as well as in pragmatic and cognitive linguistic approaches, starting with Fillmore’s frames-and-scenes semantics (1977) to Sperber and Wilson (1995), Kövecses (2000), and Tracy et al. (2007), who deal with contextual aspects of emotion language.
- 3.
- 4.
Raw frequencies and full statistics on association scores (T-test, lok-likelihood, mutual information, chi-square, Julliand’s dispersion measure and range), computed for each collocational combination – not included here for reasons of space – are available from the authors on request.
- 5.
See Wierzbicka (1992, 1994) and Dziwirek and Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (2010) for a discussion of the part-of-speech based differences of expressing emotions between Polish and English. As is also found in Wierzbicka (1999) Polish emotion terms are more frequently expressed in some types of discourse as adjectives, while in their English (translational) equivalents it is the corresponding nominal structures that are preferred in the examined data as e.g., in:
Lennie dropped his head in shame at having forgotten./Lennie spuścił głowę zawstydzony tym, że się zapomniał.
He lowered his head in shame/Opuścił głowę zażenowany
And yet, in larger samples the proportions are different: BNC (100 mln segments): ashamed 1023, with shame 49, in shame 36, of shame 135; NKJP (ca 240 mln segments): Adj zawstydzon* 787, Prep N ze wstydem 223, ze wstydu 473).
- 6.
Compare Bednarek (2008) for a differentiation between the language of emotions and emotional talk.
- 7.
The collocates for all investigated emotion terms in English and Polish are listed according to their decreasing frequencies.
- 8.
The numbers preceding the collocates are retained for those forms which fall outside of the first twenty. The structure words are omitted for the purpose of this study. The source of additional data on Nominal concepts collocating with emotion concepts are generated for English and Polish.
- 9.
The lines deleted (e.g., 9, 10) refer to homonymous forms (e.g., winnica ‘vineyard’), which are irrelevant to the present theme.
- 10.
Another polysemic sense of the Adjectival form winni (and its inflectional variants) can refer to the sense of obligation ‘(they) are supposed to/obliged to’
- 11.
For a discussion of the processes of approximation in translation see Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (2012).
- 12.
See Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (2012) for a more extensive discussion of semantic approximation, the content of approximative spaces, allowable substitutions in the spaces as well as their tolerance threshold.
- 13.
Other aspects of the ambiguity of the lexical form ‘wina’ in Polish, not relevant to this part of the discussion, although causing significant problems in the quantitative research, refer to the other sense of the form ‘wina’, which is equivalent to the meaning ‘wine’ (in Genitive Singular) in English.
- 14.
Recent tests we conducted with emotion display (joy, fear, anger) in gender-balanced groups do not show the essential effect of gender on the results. More research is needed on shame and guilt in this respect (Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk and Wilson in preparation).
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Corpora
English Microconcord and Longman Samplers
Polish PELCRA Samplers
The British National Corpus (BNC ): http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/ (100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-section of current British English, both spoken and written).
The National Corpus of Polish nkjp.pl
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Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, B., Wilson, P.A. (2014). Self-Conscious Emotions in Collectivistic and Individualistic Cultures: A Contrastive Linguistic Perspective. In: Romero-Trillo, J. (eds) Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics 2014. Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06007-1_7
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