31.889, Review: Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics: Mackenzie, Alba-Juez (2019)

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Subject: 31.889, Review: Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics: Mackenzie, Alba-Juez (2019)

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Date: Tue, 03 Mar 2020 22:26:00
From: Lucia Busso [lucia.busso90 at gmail.com]
Subject: Emotion in Discourse

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36557937


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/30/30-1977.html

EDITOR: J. Lachlan  Mackenzie
EDITOR: Laura  Alba-Juez
TITLE: Emotion in Discourse
SERIES TITLE: Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 302
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2019

REVIEWER: Lucia Busso, Aston University

SUMMARY

The collection of papers “Emotion in Discourse” is edited by J. Lachlan
Mackenzie and Laura Alba-Juez and presents with 14 chapters subdivided into 4
sections. Many of the papers in the volume present research carried out within
the EMO-FUNDETT Excellence Project (EMOtion ‘at work’:the discursive
emotive/evaluative FUNction in DiffErent Texts and work conTexts – FFI2013 –
47792-C2-1-P, PI Laura Alba-Juez, hhttp://emofundett.weebly.com). Some authors
are not members of the EMO-FUNDETT project, but their works were selected from
the talks presented at the International Conference on Language and Emotion
(UNED, Madrid, November 2016) which was organized by the EMO-FUNDETT group.

Emotion in Discourse reflects the growing scientific interest in human emotion
mechanisms and in particular their intricate relationship with human language.
The volume is interdisciplinary in nature, like emotion itself, and uses input
from psychology, neurology, and communication studies besides linguistics.
Across 4 thematic sections, the editors take a cohesive approach to the
various workings of the expression of emotion in discourse. 

As mentioned, the volume is divided into 4 Sections, preceded by an
Introduction. The first chapter Emotion processes in discourse functions as
Introduction to the volume and is authored by the two editors. It
contextualizes the book, surveying the study of emotion in discourse and
presenting the main research questions behind the EMO-FUNDETT project and the
volume. Emotion is also defined in a scientific and precise manner, and the
‘emotional turn’ in research is addressed and explained. The chapter ends with
a brief outline of the sections and chapters of the book, summarizing them and
showing how they contribute to the challenge of identifying the role of
emotion in discourse. 

The first Section of the volume is called “Emotion, syntax and the lexicon:
taboo words, interjections, axiology, phraseology”. The 6 chapters comprising
it all examine how emotion is intertwined with linguistic structures,
especially those of syntax and the lexicon, and forms an integral part of the
use of language in interaction and in thought. 

The first paper is ‘The multifunctionality of swear/taboo words in television
series’, by Monika Bednarek (University of Sydney). The author adopts the
broad perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL, Halliday, 1961) to
identify a range of swearwords and taboo expressions and their use in
contemporary US television series. The author uses a corpus-based approach,
employing a new specialized corpus of dialogue transcribed from 66
contemporary American TV series: the Sydney Corpus of Television Dialogue
(SydTV). Bednarek shows that the presence of swear and taboo words is neither
gratuitous nor merely aimed at characterization, but rather fulfills various
functions within the televisual narrative, notably that of controlling the
viewers’ emotions. 

The following chapter, ‘The syntax of an emotional expletive in English’, by
J. Lachlan Mackenzie (VU Amsterdam), argues from the viewpoint of Functional
Discourse Grammar (FDG, Dik, 1991; Hengeveld & Lachlan, 2008) that “emotion is
visible above all as an overlay on structures that communicate interpersonal
and representational meanings”. The chapter focuses on the grammatical
properties of ‘fuck’ and its derivatives, in their expletive use (i.e. in
their function of expressing emotional emphasis). The expletive items are
identified as being grammatical rather than lexical and as being optional
pragmatic markers. 

Chapter 4, ‘Interjections and emotions: The case of gosh’, by Angela Downing
and Elena Martínez Caro (Complutense University of Madrid), investigates the
interjection gosh as an expletive secondary interjection, i.e., an
interjection that appears as a complete and self-contained utterance. The
authors explore two corpora of British and American English (BNC, British
National Corpus, [BNC, 2017]; COCA, Corpus of Contemporary American English,
[Davies, 2008]). They examine gosh in terms of both formal and functional
characters (position and syntactic peripheral behavior, discourse role in
conversation), and possible differences between British and American English
use. From this analysis, it emerges that gosh is a productive and lively
interjection in present-day English. It functions as an inoffensive pragmatic
marker in both major varieties of the language. The chapter also considers the
interjection’s etymology and historical origin, identifying elements of
conventionalization and lexicalization. 

The section continues with a fifth chapter by Ruth Breeze and Manuel
Casado-Velarde (University of Navarra), ‘Expressing emotions without emotional
lexis: A crosslinguistic approach to the phraseology of the emotions in
Spanish’. In this paper, the authors focus on the phraseology used to express
emotions in Spanish, taking English as a point of comparison. In particular,
the analysis considers how emotions are expressed by lexical items and phrases
that are not inherently part of the emotional lexis. They concentrate on 3
main topics: phrases that indicate presence and absence of emotions, control
and failure to control powerful emotions, and linguistic affordances for
expressing uncomfortable but vague emotions. Several differences between the
two languages are found and thoroughly explained. 

The concluding chapter of this first section is entitled ‘The value of left
and right’, by Ad Foolen (Radboud University). It focuses on the emotive value
(‘axiology’) of left and right across different languages. What emerges is an
asymmetry in the emotional values for the two concepts. Specifically, the word
‘left’ carries a negative value, whereas ‘right’ carries positive
associations. This asymmetry in emotional values in turn “reflects a complex
interaction between neural architecture and social responses to
lateralization, as manifested for example in entrenched beliefs and feelings
about handedness”. The main claim of the author is that research on the
axiological value of left and right concepts may contribute to potentially
important insights into laterality in general. 

Section 2 is entitled “Pragmatics and emotion: cyberemotion, the emotion of
humor, pragmatic (epistemic) markers of emotion”. The general theme of the
section is the impact of emotions in various real-life situations, such as
phatic communication on the Internet, the maintenance of humor and
conviviality in conversation, and the expression of displeasure and anger at
injustices. The first contribution to this section is ‘A cognitive pragmatics
of the phatic Internet’ by Francisco Yus (University of Valencia). As the
author explains, in the ‘phatic Internet’ “(…) the propositional content
transferred to other users is increasingly irrelevant but the effects that
this content generates (in terms of emotions and feelings of connection,
sociability, group membership, friends’ acknowledgment and mutual awareness,
etc.) are utterly relevant”. The chapter argues that the emotions evoked by
phatic interactions and phatic implicatures should be researched as the main
effects of such type of communication (following Relevance Theory, RT, Sperber
& Wilson, 1986). For these types of Internet-mediated communication effects
the author proposes the term phatic effects. 

The second chapter, ‘Humor and mirth: Emotions, embodied cognition, and
sustained humor’ by Salvatore Attardo (Texas A&M University-Commerce), focuses
on ‘sustained humor’ (Attardo, 2017), i.e. humorous exchanges that last more
than three turns, which the author characterizes as a ‘virtuous circle’. The
paper takes an Embodied Cognition perspective (Wilson & Foglia, 2017) and
examines the bodily cues of humorous intention in speaker and hearer (e.g.,
smiling synchrony), and the feedback loop of reciprocity triggered by mirror
neurons. 

The paper concluding the second section of the book is ‘My anger was justified
surely? Epistemic markers across British English and German emotion events’,
authored by Nina Fronhofer (University of Augsburg). The paper focuses on
epistemic markers of ANGER events (i.e. anger, irritation, discontent) from a
cross-linguistic perspective. The research develops the Emotion Event Model
and in particular explores the role of such epistemic markers as sub-units of
analysis in Emotion Events. The analysis is carried out on a corpus of written
narratives elicited from British and German university students. Results
suggested that in general German writers display more ANGER events than
British ones, and that male writers use more epistemic markers than females.
Moreover, in the British Emotion Events, more markers of ‘low’ certainty were
used in contrast to more markers of ‘high’ certainty in the German ones. The
findings underline the importance of epistemic markers for modeling of
emotional discourse.

The third section of the volume is focused on interdisciplinary relations of
linguistics, pragmatics and psychology. It explores how emotion shows up in
different discourse types. In particular, it focuses on how emotional
intelligence correlates with pragmatic competence, how linguistic ability
correlates with capacity to recognize emotions, and how insights from
psychology engender opportunities for refining and reforming categories of
emotion proposed by linguists. 

The first paper of the section is ‘Emotion and language “at work”: The
relationship between Trait Emotional Intelligence and communicative competence
as manifested at the workplace’, by linguist Laura Alba-Juez and psychologist
Juan-Carlos Pérez-González (UNED, Madrid). The chapter explores the
relationship between Emotional Intelligence (EI) and the verbal expression of
emotion, especially focusing on emotional communication at the workplace. The
main hypothesis is that EI and (emotion) communication skills are
interrelated, which means that people who show communicative dexterity in
dealing with emotionally challenging situations are also those who show the
highest levels of EI, and vice versa. Methodologically, the research is
conducted by means of a survey to measure both EI and communicative pragmatic
competence regarding responses to emotionally challenging situations. The
questionnaire was submitted to the staff of five engineering companies.
Results show a quadratic (inverted-U) relationship between the two variables
considered. That is, a non-linear relation between communicative skills and EI
emerges. 

The following chapter, ‘The effects of linguistic proficiency, trait emotional
intelligence and cultural background on emotion recognition by British and
American English L1 users’ is authored by the University of London researchers
Jean-Marc Dewaele (Birkbeck), Pernelle Lorette (Birkbeck) and Konstantinos V.
Petrides (UCL). The paper focuses individual differences in emotion
recognition abilities (ERA). To investigate whether linguistic, cultural and
psychological profiles of individuals affect their ability to recognize
emotions, 301 native speakers of English were tested (150 Britsh and 151
American English speakers). Participants watched six video clips performed by
a British L1 English-speaking actress. Results show that participants with
high linguistic proficiency and high EI were better at emotion recognition,
whereas the ones with lower levels of linguistic proficiency relied more
heavily on their EI to recognize the emotions. Cultural background did not
yield a significant effect. 

The last chapter of Section 3 is ‘Rethinking Martin and White’s AFFECT
taxonomy: A psychologically-inspired approach to the linguistic expression of
emotion’, by Miguel-Ángel Benítez-Castro (University of Zaragoza) and
Encarnación Hidalgo-Tenorio (University of Granada). The paper argues that
although Martin & White’s (2005) Appraisal Theory is a powerful instrument to
capture the subtleties of emotion in discourse, it needs a sharper and more
accurate definition of categories. This sharper definition – the authors
suggest – may come from embracing the notion “appraisal” in the sense used in
psychology and neuroscience in the description of emotional responses. They
test their hypothesis by means of corpus data, drawing inspiration mainly from
appraisal theories, construction theories and neuroscience. The paper also
emphasizes the notion of “goal” as the foundation of all emotion types. 

The fourth and last section of the volume is concerned with the study of
emotion in different discourse types, and its effect on society. The first
paper by Isabel Alonso Belmonte (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) is ‘Victims,
heroes and villains in newsbites: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Spanish
eviction crisis in El País’. The chapter investigates the role that emotional
meaning plays in the press representation of the recent Spanish housing
crisis. It adopts a systemic-functional perspective and uses insights from
Appraisal Theory and Critical Discourse Analysis as well. The author examines
both quantitatively and qualitatively 139 newsbites published in the famous
Spanish newspaper El País. All the news collected were tagged with
“desahucios” (“forced evictions”). The main findings of the study are
essentially two: firstly, the research suggests that El País triggers
emotional responses from their audience by representing the various social
actors of the eviction crisis as either suffering victims, sympathetic heroes
or dehumanized financial and political villains. Secondly, the author shows
the strategic use of the emotional meaning encoded in verbal processes:
journalists consciously use their subjective interpretation to generate
feelings of empathy and to send a socio-political message. Quantitative data
on the distribution of the analyzed social roles is also provided. The chapter
also observes similarities with Italian journalists, who have been found to
make frequent use of the emotive impact of events as well.

The final chapter of the book, ‘Promoemotional science? Emotion and
intersemiosis in graphical abstracts’, is authored by Carmen Sancho Guinda
(Universidad Politécnica de Madrid). The chapter explores how the visual mode
favors the expression of emotional commitment to research in the new academic
genre ofgraphical abstracts. The author analyzes both verbal emotional
language and visual emotional cues of a sample of abstracts taken from
high-impact journals. Results suggest that the visual abstract involves a
hybridization of the traditional genre. Furthermore, the presence of emotion
may relate to ‘intersemiosis’, i.e. the adoption of roles other than those of
scientist, such as journalist, advertiser, and entertainer which causes a more
fluid writing style. Even though – the author argues – also elements of
stylization and trivialization can be found, graphical abstracts represent a
step towards the democratization of science. 

EVALUATION

The present volume constitutes a valuable contribution  for a number of
interrelated disciplines, such as linguistics, sociology, psychology,
philosophy, and communication studies. In fact, its merit is to provide the
reader with a wide overview of various scientific perspectives on the study of
emotions, contributing to the so-called ‘emotional turn’ not only in
linguistics, but also in other fields of scientific research.

Emotion in Discourse  presents both the state of the art and the latest
research regarding the intricate relations of emotion expression and human
language, (predominantly) adopting an interdisciplinary approach, to tackle
different aspects of the complex phenomenon of human emotion. The book
examines how emotion relates to different aspects of human language, to
linguistic appraisal and emotional intelligence or humor, as well as
investigating its surfacing in different genres. The chapters in the book are
grouped together in a coherent and clear subdivision, which guides the reader
across different thematic sections that highlights important facets of emotion
in actual discourse systems of different sociocultural environments. Overall,
the papers in this volume all offer a significant contribution to the study of
emotion in linguistics, transcending previous linguistic work and providing an
updated characterization of how emotion functions in human discourse.

The book opens with an extremely clear and informative introduction, which
presents the editors own view on emotion and language, and summarizes in an
efficient way the purposes and the content of the book. 

Section 1 is well structured, and the papers are all of extremely good
quality. The first two chapters, respectively by ‘Monika Bednarek (University
of Sydney) and J. Lachlan Mackenzie (VU Amsterdam), are both extremely
well-argued contributions. However, they both share the downside of not
presenting any data. In particular, despite the fact that Bednarek explicitly
makes use of a corpus-based approach, no quantitative information on the
corpus is provided (e.g. percentages, measures of statistical association,
keyness score, etc.)., which would have not only greatly benefitted the
analysis, but also helped the reader understand the making of the corpus used.
The following paper’s argumentation as well is somewhat penalized by the lack
of quantitative and ‘real’ data. Chapter 4 by Angela Downing and Elena
Martínez Caro (Complutense University of Madrid) convincingly presents data
and results, arguing their hypotheses with data from the two corpora used. The
fifth chapter by Ruth Breeze and Manuel Casado-Velarde (University of Navarra)
is excellent in all regards, and presents with a perfect argumentation and
some thought-provoking suggestions which are of interest not only for
linguists, but for teachers, philosophers and psychologists alike. The
following contribution ‘The value of left and right’, by Ad Foolen (Radboud
University) presents an extremely ‘rich’ characterization of the emotional
value of axiology, with inputs from socio-cultural and psychological data and
facts that poignantly contribute to the argumentation.

The second section’s first contribution is ‘A cognitive pragmatics of the
phatic Internet’ by Francisco Yus (University of Valencia). The chapter is
extremely innovative, as it tackles the relatively new phenomena of
internet-mediated communication and social media, which still lack thorough
linguistic and philosophical research. It is clearly a preliminary study, and
much additional research (both qualitative and quantitative) remains to be
done, but the paper contributes to the growing linguistic debate in an
interesting and rigorous way. The second chapter, ‘Humor and mirth: Emotions,
embodied cognition, and sustained humor’ by Salvatore Attardo (Texas A&M
University-Commerce), is theoretical in nature. It presents the author’s
thesis in a rigorous and well-argued manner. Moreover, the claims made in this
contribution are ready to be subjected to experimental work– especially in the
field of neurolinguistics – which renders the contribution an extremely
valuable ‘starting point’ for future research. The paper concluding this
section is ‘My anger was justified surely? Epistemic markers across British
English and German emotion events’, authored by Nina Fronhofer (University of
Augsburg). The paper presents both state-of-the-art innovative statistical
techniques to analyze the data and an accurate qualitative assessment of the
significance of such findings, which render the analysis presented extremely
thorough and convincing.

The third section focuses on interdisciplinary studies on emotion. It groups
two experimental and innovative papers, with a more theoretically-oriented
one. The first paper, by linguist Laura Alba-Juez and psychologist Juan-Carlos
Pérez-González (UNED, Madrid), is well structured and very well argued, with
an in-depth theoretical review of many concepts presented throughout the
chapter. The research presented is preliminary but promising. The methodology
and analysis is sound, although the experimental design (using only
questionnaires) is – perhaps – a little too simple to explore such a complex
and interrelated phenomenon. However, the extremely sound and complex analysis
of the data gives an in-depth understanding of the data presented. The
following chapter, ‘The effects of linguistic proficiency, trait emotional
intelligence and cultural background on emotion recognition by British and
American English L1 users’ is authored by Jean-Marc Dewaele (Birkbeck),
Pernelle Lorette (Birkbeck) and Konstantinos V. Petrides (UCL). The paper is
thought-provoking and extremely accurate. The statistical method used is
three-way anova, whereas it is my opinion that a mixed model would have
yielded more sound results, also in view of the non-normally distributed and
slightly skewed data that the authors themselves report. The last chapter of
Section 3 is ‘Rethinking Martin and White’s AFFECT taxonomy: A
psychologically-inspired approach to the linguistic expression of emotion’, by
Miguel-Ángel Benítez-Castro (University of Zaragoza) and Encarnación
Hidalgo-Tenorio (University of Granada). The analysis is detailed and
well-presented. It presents numerous (more than 60!) linguistic examples to
support the author’s thesis, and proposes convincing fine-grained refinements
to the system of AFFECT, to highlight the necessity of a more psychological
perspective in SFL.

The fourth and last section of the volume comprises two papers focusing on
emotional discourse in journalistic and scientific language. Both the chapters
are examples of thorough qualitative studies, and provide fine-grained
analyses of interesting phenomena related to emotion in language. The first
paper by Isabel Alonso Belmonte (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) is ‘Victims,
heroes and villains in newsbites: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Spanish
eviction crisis in El País’. The analysis is conducted rigorously and
accurately, reporting numerous examples from the newspaper in question. The
final chapter of the book, ‘Promoemotional science? Emotion and intersemiosis
in graphical abstracts’, is authored by Carmen Sancho Guinda (Universidad
Politécnica de Madrid). The article is innovative in respect both to the genre
studied and to the methodology and results, even though the topic it appears
to be related more to semiotics than to linguistics per se.

Overall, the volume constitutes an extremely interesting collection of
innovative studies, which represent a significant contribution to the
interdisciplinary effort to bring the attention of the scientific community on
the relations among emotion, language and society.

REFERENCES

Attardo, S. (2017). Humor in language. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of
Linguistics.

Dik, S. (1991). Functional grammar. Linguistic theory and grammatical
description, 75, 247-274.

Halliday, M. A. K. (1961). Categories of the theory of grammar. Word, 17(2),
241-292.

Hengenveld, K., & Lachlan Mackenzie, J. (2008). A typologically-based theory
of language structure. Functional Discourse Grammar.

Martin, J. R., & White, P. R. R. (2005). The language of evaluation: Appraisal
in English. London: Continuum Press.

Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1986). Relevance: Communication and cognition (Vol.
142). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wilson Robert, A., & Foglia, L. (2017). Embodied Cognition. The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

I am a post-doc researcher at Aston University. I just finished (cum laude) my
PhD at the University of Pisa. My research interests span from Usage Based
models to pragmatics, corpus linguistics and psycholinguistics. My focus is on
the syntax-semantics interface.





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