36.2938, Reviews: Positive Emotions in Old English Language and Thought: Javier E. Díaz-Vera (2025)

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Subject: 36.2938, Reviews: Positive Emotions in Old English Language and Thought: Javier E. Díaz-Vera (2025)

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Date: 01-Oct-2025
From: Heli Tissari [heli.tissari at umu.se]
Subject: Cognitive Science, General Linguistics, Historical Linguistics, Sociolinguistics: Javier E. Díaz-Vera (2025)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/36-606

Title: Positive Emotions in Old English Language and Thought
Subtitle: An Emotion Family Approach
Series Title: Topics in English Linguistics
Publication Year: 2025

Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
           https://cloud.newsletter.degruyter.com/mouton
Book URL:
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111641881/html

Author(s): Javier E. Díaz-Vera

Reviewer: Heli Tissari

SUMMARY
As the title of the book indicates, Díaz-Vera is not only interested
in the lexical semantics of positive emotions in Old English, but in
how speakers of Old English experienced and understood positive
emotions and how their experience and understanding of them changed in
the course of time. This can be nicely summarized in Díaz-Vera’s own
words; he says that he combines “methods from historical linguistics
and cultural psychology” (p. 290). He promotes his research by
claiming that “positive emotions are understudied and in dire need of
systematic attention” (p. 26).
In the brief introduction to the book, Díaz-Vera presents his three
main objectives. The first one is to “reconstruct the various ways in
which Anglo-Saxon authors discussed positive emotions” (p. 2). As
regards this objective, Díaz-Vera emphasizes that he is interested in
“semantic variation and change” (p. 2). The second objective is to
investigate how people thought about emotions and how they thought
about the relationships between various emotions. In this context,
Díaz-Vera talks about “folk conceptualizations” (p. 2), which reminds
me of the terms “folk model” (Kövecses 1990: 17) and “folk theories of
emotion” (Kövecses 2000: 114–138). The third objective is to shed
light on changes in Old English speakers’ experiences of positive
emotions.
The actual research questions are introduced in the first chapter (p.
22):
“1. How was the Old English vocabulary for positive emotions
developed? What emotion concepts were considered more relevant for
communication?
2. What was the role of figurativeness (metaphor and metonymy) and
embodiment in the development of this set of expressions for positive
emotions?
3. What motifs were preferred by Anglo-Saxon authors to conceptualize
figuratively these positive emotions?
4. Do these conceptual preferences reflect concrete aspects of
Anglo-Saxon psychology and society?”
To answer the first research question, Díaz-Vera looks at dictionaries
of Old English and compiles lists of words used for positive emotions.
He emphasizes that this is an onomasiological approach. In other
words, he studies all the lexical items that refer to positive
emotions in Old English.
To answer the second research question, Díaz-Vera groups the lexical
items according to what he calls “etymological themes” (p. 9). He
categorises the items into literal and figurative. In Chapter One, he
paves the way for our understanding of the role of embodiment in the
birth of relevant lexical items by giving examples of what kind of
Proto-Indo-European roots developed meanings related to emotions. One
such root is *bhlei- ‘to shine, glitter’ that gave rise to words
denoting joy (p. 11). He explains that a person experiencing joy may
attest physical changes which suggest the conceptual domain of LIGHT.
To continue with the third research question, Díaz-Vera studies the
lexical items in context to identify conceptual metaphors. As to the
fourth research question, he considers “predominant beliefs regarding
positive emotions according to the various theories of the mind that
coexisted in Anglo-Saxon England” (p. 46). He illustrates this
approach in chapter three by discussing ten emotion expressions from
the Thesaurus of Old English that are categorised under “08.01.01.01
Ardour, fervour, strong feeling”. He gives examples of such words in
context and explains how they relate to what he calls “cardiocentric
imagery”, that is, the idea that emotions are located in the heart or,
more generally, in the breast. Interestingly, his investigation
suggests that positive emotions such as pride, interest, and joy could
become too intense and thus uncomfortable, even leading to negative
emotions. The only exception is Christian love, whose intensity can
grow without such limitations.
To return to Chapter One, Díaz-Vera also discusses previous research
and arrives at the decision to also consider his data in terms of the
Geneva Emotion Wheel (version 3.0, henceforth GEW) introduced by
Scherer (2005; see also Scherer, Schuman, Fontaine & Soriano 2013).
Díaz-Vera explains that the GEW classifies emotions according to the
dimensions of intensity, “[v]alence or agreeableness of the
situation”, and “[i]nfluence/control over the situation” (p. 23). He
returns to this theme in Chapter Five, where he discusses what he
calls “clusters of meaning”, based on the “motifs suggested by the
metonymies, synaesthesias, and metaphors” (p. 242) that he discusses
in connection with the lexical items in Chapter Four. I will return to
this. To conclude my summary of Chapter One, Díaz-Vera also discusses
the nonverbal expression of positive emotions there, such as “fast
speech rate”, “large smile”, and “upwards bodily movements” for joy
(p. 30).
In the second chapter, Díaz-Vera explains his choice of data. He
explains that he has “created [his] own annotated version of the
Dictionary of Old English Corpus” (p. 32). The idea behind this is to
cover as much data as possible. He then explains how he has identified
and classified positive emotions. In brief, his classification is
based on the “ten positive emotion families proposed by the authors of
the GEW” (p. 33) on the one hand, and on Old English Dictionaries,
including the Thesaurus of Old English, on the other hand. He
dedicates several pages in the chapter to illustrating that this was
not a simple task. Of special interest to metaphor scholars is
Díaz-Vera’s Table 8, “Overall semantic classification of emotion
expressions based on source domains” (p. 40), where he summarizes his
understanding of the continuum from literal to metonymic to
metaphorical meanings. Chapter Two ends with sections on “Corpus
annotation and markup” and “The search process”, specifying what kind
of things Díaz-Vera could search for in the corpus with the help of
corpus analysis software.
I have already mentioned Chapter Three, which discusses “Rivalling
cultural models for positive emotions in Old English texts”. Here,
Díaz-Vera returns to “folk conceptualizations” (p. 2), which he now
calls “folk models” and compares with scientific knowledge. He writes,
above all, about the humoral theory and about the idea that emotions
can be experienced as heat inside the body.
Chapter Four, “The expression of positive emotions in Old English”
(pp. 66–241), forms the bulk of the book. There, Díaz-Vera discusses
each of the emotion families in turn: INTEREST, AMUSEMENT, PRIDE, JOY,
SENSORY PLEASURE, CONTENTMENT, LOVE, ADMIRATION, RELIEF, and
COMPASSION. Instead of discussing the families in alphabetical order,
he follows the GEW clockwise, beginning from the “emotion family with
the highest subjective degree of control and power by the subject
affected by this emotion, i.e. interest” (p. 66). He first introduces
interest by defining what it is and discussing what kind of nonverbal
behaviour it goes together with. He then introduces the
“lexico-semantic structure of OE INTEREST”, which means that he tells
the readers how he has identified the relevant lexical items and where
they come from. He continues by discussing two distinct kinds of
interest, “positive and negative interest”, underlining that in Old
English times, “eagerness for knowledge” could be seen as an
“intellectual vice” (p. 69). Thereafter, he treats “OE metaphors of
interest” such as the idea that “this emotion was conceptualized as A
PHYSICAL FORCE by some Anglo-Saxon poets” (p. 71). Before rounding up
with a discussion, he deals with what he calls “Minor interest
expressions”, such as the word “carfulnes” that “is used to gloss L
curiositas ‘curiosity’ in a list of sins recorded in a form of
confession” (p. 73). In the discussion section, he summarizes “Literal
and figurative expressions for INTEREST in the Old English corpus”
(table 10, p. 74). He concludes that although there is little data on
INTEREST in Old English, the results are of value.
To give another example, Díaz-Vera begins his discussion of OE PRIDE
by defining it and relating it to the GEW: “Pride is considered an
emotion with a relatively high level of control by the individual
affected by this emotion; however, pride is less controllable than
interest and amusement.” (P. 86.) He then considers the evolutionary
origins of pride and goes on to discuss its nonverbal and verbal
expressions. In the next section, he discusses how pride is presented
in the Thesaurus of Old English and quite rightly points out that OE
PRIDE has been studied by Fabiszak and Hebda (2010). Quoting their
research, he presents Table 12, which lists “[c]auses, [behavioural]
reactions and consequences of pride in Old English religious and
non-religious texts” (p. 89). He then dedicates around ten pages to
the “lexico-semantic structure of OE PRIDE” (pp. 89–100), discussing
various lexical items referring to pride, their numbers of
occurrences, their etymologies, and their meanings in context. After
that, he focuses on the literal pride expressions “ofermod”, “gylp”,
“oferhygd”, “wlanc”, and “pryd”. He concludes that they have a
“relatively wide semantic scope” and that, although “most of them”
have negative connotations, a “more positive conception of pride
survives in non-religious texts and, especially, in epic poetry” (p.
105). Moreover, he deals with the triggers of pride (e.g. good looks),
behavioural reactions to pride (e.g. bragging), and metaphors and
symbols of pride (e.g. PRIDE IS SWELLING). Lastly, he provides his
readers with a discussion section which summarizes his findings and
relates them to previous research. He concludes that this analysis
“confirms the strong preference for literal emotion expressions, and
the relative importance of metonymy, rather than metaphor, in terms of
the understanding of this emotional experience” (p. 117).
In Chapter Five, Díaz-Vera combines the linguistic research presented
in Chapter Four with the GEW and with previous research by Uchida and
Kitayama (2009). Based on the motifs that he has identified in his
linguistic data, he identifies six “meaning clusters” that are:
positive hedonic experience, negative hedonic experience, personal
achievement, social harmony, transcendental reappraisal, and social
disruption (see table 24 on p. 243). He discusses each of these
meaning clusters separately, providing his readers with six figures
which show which percent of the cluster is contained by which emotion
family. For example, AMUSEMENT covers more of the cluster “positive
hedonic experience” than any other emotion family (19.32%), while
SENSORY PLEASURE (18.33%) and JOY (17.24%) closely follow it.
INTEREST, on the other hand, is the emotion family that covers least
of the cluster “positive hedonic experience” (0%). (Figure 2 on p.
247.)
As regards “positive hedonic experience”, Díaz-Vera points out, among
other things, that the experience can be either bodily or mental.
Similarly, when he discusses “personal achievement”, he points out
that people could have plenty of either “material” or “spiritual
goods” (p. 253). “Negative hedonic experience” plays a small role in
the conceptualization of positive emotions but can be of interest. One
relevant emotion in this regard is compassion, which yields such
motifs as PITY, MENTAL PAIN, PHYSICAL PAIN, and LAMENT (p. 249).
The cluster “transcendental reappraisal” may not be very translucent.
Díaz-Vera characterizes it as follows (p. 259): “[T]he perceiver takes
into consideration different strategies of regulation of the emotional
experience, aimed at rethinking, hiding, or suppressing it.” Quite
fittingly, Díaz-Vera discusses this cluster after “Social harmony” and
before “Social disruption”. The main source domains in “Social
harmony” are KINDNESS, GRATITUDE, LOYALTY, and KINSHIP AND FRIENDSHIP
(p. 255). The emotions that can give rise to “Social disruption”
include INTEREST (86.7%), SENSORY PLEASURE (6.49%), AMUSEMENT (3.39%),
and CONTENTMENT (2.46%) (p. 264). Díaz-Vera concludes Chapter Five by
suggesting that speakers of Old English mainly understood positive
emotions as experiences that were rewarding “either for the
individual” or “for the entire social group” (p. 267).
In Chapter Six, he proceeds to further conclusions. An interesting
conclusion is that JOY is the “most prototypical member of the Old
English category of positive emotions” (p. 271). Díaz-Vera indeed goes
as far as to suggest that LOVE should be understood as a member of
this more general category. As regards figurative language, Díaz-Vera
suggests that speakers of Old English used more literal than
figurative expressions for positive emotions. However, he also
dedicates some space to discussing the role of metonymy in the
creation of lexical items for new categories such as contentment,
relief, and compassion. He then returns to the role of intrapersonal
versus interpersonal aspects of emotions, making important
generalisations. For example, he claims that “shared entertainment
[was] considered more hedonically pleasing than --- individual
activities guided by one’s curiosity” (p. 280) and that Old English
speakers valued virtue and “foster[ed] an optimistic outlook towards
the future” (p. 281). Lastly in Chapter Six, Díaz-Vera considers
“Conceptual variation across textual genres, individual authors, and
communities”, underlining, for example, Ælfric’s role in introducing
new ideas about emotions.
The book closes with “Concluding remarks” where Díaz-Vera emphasizes
the “tension between the Germanic and the Christian systems of
attitudes, beliefs, values, and behaviours” (p. 289) and returns to
JOY as a central category of positive emotions. Moreover, he presents
ideas for further research, such as the idea that one could apply the
same methodology to studying Middle English. The book also includes a
lengthy list of references (pp. 293–307) and an index (pp. 309–314).
EVALUATION
I am not entirely certain whether positive emotions are in more need
of study than negative emotions. Above all, there is plenty of
research in positive psychology. Eleven years ago, Tugade, Shiota, and
Kirby noted that “psychological research on positive emotions has
burgeoned within the past 20 years” (2014: 1). While I was writing
this review, I noticed the publication of a new book titled “Positive
emotions” (Fredrickson 2025). However, I agree that positive emotions
are an important topic for study,  because, for example, they “promote
resilience” (Fredrickson 2025: 1), and it is excellent that linguists
are contributing to this topic.
While Díaz-Vera’s book makes very interesting reading, I had some
difficulties following the argument. For example, it took me some time
to realize that Díaz-Vera based the clusters of meaning on Uchida and
Kitayama’s work (2009). While Uchida and Kitayama (2009) are credited
for their work in the beginning of the book (pp. 15, 17–18), several
other authors are also discussed, so that I was at first not able to
see what was most central to the development of Díaz-Vera’s own
method. I would have liked to read more about why he arrived at this
choice.
To give another example, on page 19 Díaz-Vera introduces what he calls
“three structural levels” of analysis: “(i) lexemes > expressions;
(ii) expressions > source domains; and (iii) source domains > meaning
clusters.” This division is central to his analysis, but it was
difficult for me to relate it to the research questions since these
were only introduced later. Also, a separate chapter was dedicated to
annotating the corpus, but there was no explicit mention of “three
structural levels” there. Instead, the chapter delves, among other
things, into detail concerning the tagging of the data that is not
explicitly revisited anywhere in the book.
In brief, I would say that Díaz-Vera could have been even clearer
about the main choices he made and perhaps downplayed some other
detail. However, my general impression of the book is that it is
balanced and well-written.
There is no doubt that Díaz-Vera’s book is the result of much hard
work. Díaz-Vera himself talks about a “decade of research” (p. VII).
Based solely on the amount of data Díaz-Vera has covered, it can be
said that the book has plenty of value. It also has value because it
is a systematic overview of positive emotions in Old English. It is a
repository of knowledge; anyone interested in any positive emotion in
Old English should use it as a reference work. I am now especially
referring to Chapter Four, which I have covered rather superficially,
and the fact that it discusses ten emotion families in detail. As
someone interested in the language of emotions, I especially
appreciate the inclusion of not only JOY, LOVE and PRIDE in the book,
but also such lesser studied historical emotions as INTEREST, SENSORY
PLEASURE, and RELIEF. As Díaz-Vera suggests, the book sets an example
of what could be done with another historical variety of English.
It can also be said that Díaz-Vera achieves a synthesis in the book,
in Chapters Five and Six. He is able to successfully combine his
linguistic analysis with psychological models. He can explain not only
what kind of expressions Old English speakers used about positive
emotions but also how they thought about and evaluated positive
emotions. This achievement is relevant not only to medieval scholars
but also to  scholars of emotion more generally, and especially to the
comparison of languages and cultures.
REFERENCES
Fabiszak, Małgorzata & Anna Hebda. 2010. Cognitive historical
approaches to emotions: Pride. In Margaret E. Winters, Heli Tissari &
Kathryn Allan (eds.), Historical cognitive linguistics, 261–297.
Berlin & New York: De Gruyter Mouton.
Fredrickson, Barbara L. 2025. Positive emotions: Key scientific
contributions and the stories behind them. Oxford: Oxford University
Press. DOI: 10.1093/9780197754825.001.0001
Kövecses, Zoltán. 1990. Emotion concepts. New York etc.: Springer.
Kövecses, Zoltán. 2000. Metaphor and emotion: Language, culture, and
body in human feeling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Scherer, Klaus R. 2005. What are emotions? And how can they be
measured? Social Science Information 44(4). 695–729. DOI:
10.1177/0539018405058216
Scherer, Klaus R., Vera Shuman, Johnny J. R. Fontaine & Cristina
Soriano. 2013. The GRID meets the Wheel: Assessing emotional feeling
via self-report. In Johnny J. R. Fontaine, Klaus R. Scherer & Cristina
Soriano (eds.), Components of emotional meaning: A sourcebook,
281–298. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
A Thesaurus of Old English. 2017. Glasgow: University of Glasgow.
http://oldenglishthesaurus.arts.gla.ac.uk/
Tugade, Michele M., Michelle N. Shiota & Leslie D. Kirby. 2014.
Introduction. In Michele M. Tugade, Michelle N. Shiota, Leslie D.
Kirby & Barbara L. Fredrickson (eds.), Handbook of positive emotions,
1–7. New York & London: Guilford.
Uchida, Yukiko & Shinobu Kitayama. 2009. Happiness and unhappiness in
East and West: Themes and variations. Emotion 9(4). 441– 456. DOI:
10.1037/a0015634
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Dr. Heli Tissari teaches English linguistics at Umeå University in
Sweden. She is interested in the language of emotion and, in
particular, words and metaphors for emotions, as well as other
expressions with words for emotions (such as “I fear that”). At the
time she was writing this review, she was also teaching a course on
words and metaphors for emotions in English. Her latest publication
was a joint article on affect expressions occurring in people’s
written stories about the music of video games.



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