[Lingtyp] languages with few (emotion) nouns

Nicholas Evans nicholas.evans at anu.edu.au
Tue Dec 10 03:55:17 UTC 2024


Hi Maia,

Thanks for this interesting enquiry.

In Nen (Yam family, PNG) the commonest way to express emotions is through an experiencer object construction of the type:

NP<experiencer:object: ABSOLUTIVE> NP<stimulus.transitive.subject: ERGATIVE> V<transitive, agreeing with the stimulus in its subject slot and the experiencer in its object slot>

The stimulus NP is usually a bare noun (though it can be modified), and denotes a range of stimulus types including sensations (itchiness, hunger, arousal), ailments (diarrhoea) and emotions (e.g. Anger, exasperation, pity/empathy).

You can find a list of these stimulus nouns in Table 1.1 on p. 17-18 of the attached soon-to-appear article.

This construction is widespread in Papuan languages, but we still await a comprehensive survey of the emotion nouns that occur in it; certainly the list of Nen emotion nouns included here is far from complete.

Best Nick




Coombs Building, Fellows Road
CHL, CAP, Australian National University

nicholas.evans at anu.edu.au

I acknowledge the Ngunnawal people as custodians of the land on which I work, and pay my respects to their elders, past and present. Their custodianship has never been ceded.

________________________________
From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of PONSONNET Maia via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Sent: Tuesday, December 10, 2024 11:12 AM
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Subject: [Lingtyp] languages with few (emotion) nouns


Dear all,


Nearly two years ago, several of you responded to a query on this list regarding pain interjections.

With the help of Christophe Coupé, Kasia Pisanski, François Pellegrino and Aitana Garcia Arasco, we took this further and identified puzzling form-meaning correlations in pain interjections<https://pubs.aip.org/asa/jasa/article/156/5/3118/3319867/Vowel-signatures-in-emotional-interjections-and>.


I am very grateful for all your contributions, which confirmed my inclination to investigate the matter.

(The data shared on this list was upgraded for published data in the actual data set.)


Today, I am considering a different question, namely which emotions languages tend to describe as nouns (rather than words from other classes).

In Australian languages this is reasonably easy to investigate<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07268602.2024.2329890>, due to a relative scarcity of abstract nouns.


In order to put the Australian distribution into typological perspective, I am now looking for other languages with small numbers of nouns/abstract nouns/emotion nouns.


Any suggestion in this respect will be most welcome !


With many thanks again to LingTyp community for such insightful discussions, and for sharing data,

Maïa


Maïa Ponsonnet

Chargée de Recherche HDR @ CNRS Dynamique Du Langage

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Membre du Comité d'Ethique de la Recherche, Université de Lyon

<https://www.universite-lyon.fr/recherche/comite-d-ethique-de-la-recherche/comite-d-ethique-de-la-recherche-245561.kjsp>

https://tinyurl.com/cerunivdelyon




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