call for papers

[Mary Bucholtz]

CALL FOR PAPERS


Pragmatics & Cognition announces a special issue on


THE BODY IN DESCRIPTION OF EMOTION: CROSS-LINGUISTIC STUDIES

Guest Editors
N.J. Enfield and Anna Wierzbicka

'Emotions' combine feelings, thoughts and bodily events/processes in
complex ways. The role of the body in emotion has commonly been a subject
of clinical research, but it has less often come into discussion of the
semantics and pragmatics of how languages encode ideas about emotion. Apart
from well known work on 'metaphor', concentrating on English, there is
little data available on how the body enters into the way that languages
codify ideas about emotions. This includes meaning extensions (by metaphor
or metonymy) of the basic vocabulary of emotion, idiomatic phrases and
common discourse about emotional experience, folk theory and description of
exactly what goes on in the body when emotions occur.

The main question which we would expect the submissions to address is: How
do speakers of the world's languages refer to the body in talking about
emotions?

English-language descriptions of emotion are also 'folk descriptions', not
culture-free, and this makes data from all languages equally valid and
valuable in informing our understanding of the complex relationships
between thoughts, feelings, and bodily processes inherent in ideas of
'emotions'. It is then necessary to
understand, compare and contrast as wide a range as possible of the various
'folk descriptions' of emotions which the rest of the world's languages
allow us access to. In particular, data on how speakers refer to the body
in their talk about emotions will be a valuable addition to the limited
corpus of broad cross-linguistic data on the linguistics of emotion.

One purpose of this special issue is to contribute to current research by
providing empirically sound descriptions from typologically diverse and
geographically widespread languages, with at least some representation of
languages of Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australia, Europe, and Oceania.

Deadline for submission: September 1, 2000
Editorial decisions: December 1, 2000
Revised papers due: February 1, 2001
Expected publication: October 2001