37.1629, Reviews: The Sociopragmatics of Emotion: Laura Alba-Juez; Michael Haugh (eds.) (2025)

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Subject: 37.1629, Reviews: The Sociopragmatics of Emotion: Laura Alba-Juez; Michael Haugh (eds.) (2025)

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Date: 01-May-2026
From: Heli Tissari [heli.tissari at umu.se]
Subject: Laura Alba-Juez; Michael Haugh (eds.) (2025)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/36-2825

Title: The Sociopragmatics of Emotion
Publication Year: 2025

Publisher: Cambridge University Press
           http://www.cambridge.org/linguistics
Book URL:
https://www.cambridge.org/ch/universitypress/subjects/languages-linguistics/semantics-and-pragmatics/sociopragmatics-emotion?format=HB&isbn=9781009368407

Editor(s): Laura Alba-Juez; Michael Haugh

Reviewer: Heli Tissari

SUMMARY
The introductory chapter to the volume “The Sociopragmatics of
Emotion” is lengthy (pp. 3-37) and theoretical, because its authors,
the editors of the volume, Laura Alba-Juez and Michael Haugh, have set
ambitious goals. They would like the book to “illustrate what a
sociopragmatic perspective brings to the broader scholarly
understanding of emotion and its role in social life” and to “lay the
foundations for a sociopragmatic theorization of emotion” (p. 7). In
the chapter, Alba-Juez and Haugh underline that emotions occur in
social interaction and are culturally conditioned and that they ought
to be studied as such. Their understanding of sociopragmatics is
broad, encompassing various “interpersonal dimensions of language use”
such as face, identity, and humour, and how these “are constituted
through language” (p. 6). They have chosen three key dimensions as the
focus of the entire volume. These are evaluation, relationships, and
morality. They state that this addresses a research gap.
I paid attention to three specific claims about emotions that
Alba-Juez and Haugh make in the introduction. One is the idea that not
only experience of emotion leads to its display, but also that display
of emotion leads to its experience (p. 14). The other is that
“[e]motions are inherently unpredictable phenomena” (p. 16), and the
third claim is that there is so much to investigate about emotions
that it does not suffice to study them “through a single approach or
even a single discipline” (p. 30).
The main bulk of the book is divided into three parts titled “Emotion
and evaluation”, “Emotion and relationships”, and “Emotion and
morality”. The first study to be presented under “Emotion and
evaluation” is Laura Alba-Juez’s chapter “Invoked emotions in times of
Coronavirus”, with the subtitle “A sociopragmatic analysis of the
narratives of healthcare workers and victims of Covid-19 in Spain
during lockdown”. A main distinction which Alba-Juez makes in this
chapter is the difference between “inscribed” and “invoked” emotion
(the terms come from Martin and White 2005; see e.g. p. 67). In other
words, she is interested in whether the experiencers of emotion talk
about emotions directly or indirectly. Her hypothesis, that they are
more likely to talk about them indirectly, is confirmed by the
analysis. She describes in detail what kind of challenges she
encountered in the analysis and provides her readers both with a list
of “mechanisms for invoking emotion in the Covid narratives”,
including such items as “graduation devices that signal affect”,
“lexical metaphors”, and “irony” (p. 53), and an ample set of examples
from her data.
The second study under the rubric “Emotion and evaluation” continues
with the topic of Covid. It is Carmen Maíz-Arévalo and Francisco Yus’s
“The use of humour as an affiliative strategy in times of Covid”, and
it deals with a sample of 250 Spanish memes that circulated in social
media during the lockdown. These memes are divided into affiliative,
aggressive, self-deprecating, and self-enhancing; of these,
affiliative memes are the most frequent (60%, p. 83). Maíz-Arevalo and
Yu also divide the memes into textual memes, purely visual memes, and
macro memes combining both text and image. The last kind are the most
common in the data (58%, p. 85). The chapter is richly illustrated;
the reader will see many memes.
The third and last study under “Emotion and evaluation” is Carmen
Sancho Guinda’s chapter “Promoemotion in action: Sci-tech marketing in
university innovation portfolios”. Sancho Guinda discusses what she
calls the “ʻemotional turn’ in the promotion of university
technologies” (p. 96). She attributes this turn to the recent
development of scholarly language, the “commodification and
marketisation of higher education and academic discourses”,
computer-mediated communication, “some alternative views of technical
writing”, and the “gradual broadening of audiences for the genre” (p.
97). She analyses so-called “technology disclosures” from the
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, which, according to her, attest
empathy. She divides empathy further into “participative involvement”,
“metadiscursive guidance”, and “amusement” (p. 100).
Next in the volume come four chapters under the rubric “Emotion and
relationships”. This section begins with Carolina Figueras Bates’s
chapter “Doing emotions and displaying empathy: The construction of
online peer support” where she analyses data from two Reddit forums
representing discussions about anorexia nervosa and borderline
personality disorder. Her data consists of 272 + 303 comments from the
two fora that attest instances of the verb ‘to feel’ (p. 127). She
distinguishes between four overlapping clusters of meaning of ‘to
feel’: ‘to be in a physical or emotional state’, ‘mental or physical
sensation’, ‘cognitive perception’, and ‘ability to perceive’ (pp.
128–130) and shows that there are “core differences in the business of
doing emotions in the two forums examined” (p. 137). To put it
roughly, the discussions about borderline personality disorder focused
on emotions, while the discussions about anorexia nervosa centred
around bodily sensations.
Chapter Six in the volume is Yongping Ran and Linlin Fan’s
“Understanding affective aspects of Chinese relational practice: From
the perspectives of ‘heart’ and ‘face’”. In this chapter, Ran and Fan
promote the concept of ‘heart’ alongside that of ‘face’ for discussing
emotion and relationships. They explain how this concept has already
been used by other Asian scholars, how it works across various
cultures, and how it “underscores the importance of emotions, mental
states and sentiments in interpersonal interactions” (p. 152). They
define ‘heart’ “as a general concern for other people’s feelings and
emotional well-being” and HTA (heart-threatening act) as “an action
that challenges an individual’s emotional well-being” (p. 153). They
then discuss scenes from a documentary series where Chinese doctors
show concern for their patients and their relatives’ feelings and
emotional well-being when urging them to pay for the treatments.
Ran and Fan’s chapter is followed by Tatiana Larina’s chapter “Emotive
politeness and communicative styles: Leave-taking in British and
Russian interpersonal interaction”. In her chapter, Larina reports on
a discourse completion task that she has used to collect data from 100
British English and 100 Russian speakers. The imaginary situation for
the informants is leaving a friend’s house after dinner. Larina
reports that both groups of informants suggested “similar types of
supportive moves: (1) gratitude, (2) positive evaluation, (3)
reciprocal invitation and (4) intention of further contacts” (p. 177).
However, there are also important differences. The biggest and most
important difference, according to Larina, is that British English
speakers use these moves much more frequently than Russian speakers
(p. 180). Larina also considers patterns of moves, the most frequent
of which includes two moves in both languages, and leave-taking
sequences, which are “more expressive and verbose” in British English
(p. 184).
The last chapter in the section “Emotions and relationships” is Shelby
R. Miller, Hilal Ergül, and Salvatore Attardo’s “Laughter and
embarrassment in a complicated task”. The complicated task is a
“Tetris-like jigsaw puzzle” (p. 199). Miller, Ergül and Attardo have
analysed conversational data from five male, five female, and six
mixed-gender dyads. They tell us that they have also conducted
follow-up interviews and that each of the participants has “completed
the MBTI personality inventory” (p. 199). They pay attention both to
verbal and non-verbal indicators of embarrassment in their analysis,
which focuses on three types of embarrassment. In the first type, the
“speaker is embarrassed about their own behaviour” (p. 202); in the
second type, the interlocutor is vicariously embarrassed about the
speaker’s behaviour; and in the third type, both persons are
embarrassed. The dialogue excerpts provided are illustrated with
photographs. The most frequent behaviour when embarrassed in these
data is gaze aversion, and the next frequent behaviour when
embarrassed is genuine smiling. The authors say that their conclusions
regarding personality types are “tentative and provisional” because
they do not have data for all personality types but that they “are not
aware of any similar research in interactional sociopragmatics” (p.
211). However, their finding, that introverts are more easily
embarrassed than extroverts, aligns with earlier psychological
research (e.g., Kelly & Jones 1997).
The next section in the book, “Emotion and morality”, comprises three
chapters. The first one of them is Isolda E. Carranza’s “The
institutional relevance of emotions: Moral-nexus effects in the
courtroom”. The moral nexus that Carranza is interested in is the
“convergence of ideational, emotional, and moral aspects” (p. 238) in
courtroom talk. Her data comes from Argentina, where she has conducted
an ethnographic study spanning over several years. In this chapter,
she focuses on three topics, “talk about basic emotions”, “talk about
emotion displays”, and “responding to emotion displays in
interaction”. Among others, she discusses a situation where a widow
seemed to grieve her late husband too little, and what kind of
comments this elicited from the prosecutor and from a legal advocate.
The second chapter about “Emotion and morality” is titled “Displaying
embarrassment as social action in business interactions”, and it has
been written by Wei-Lin Melody Chang and Michael Haugh, who have
conducted sequential analyses of “business interactions involving
insurance agents and marketing managers in Taiwan” (p. 247). In their
chapter, they focus on a single encounter between an insurance agent
and his client where the insurance agent asks the client why he has
insured his vehicle elsewhere. The insurance agent’s question alludes
to the fact that the two men have been doing business together and
that his client should continue to be loyal to him. Chang and Haugh
explain that this relates to the Chinese concept of “guanxi” which
suggests that the agent and his client have been building “relational
capital” (p. 261). They make the point that the insurance agent
exposes the embarrassable on purpose and chooses to ignore his
client’s displays of embarrassment until the matter is settled.
The last chapter about “Emotion and morality” is written by Carmen
Santamaría-García and is titled “‘I’m so angry!’ Anger and taking
offence in calls to an insurance company”. Santamaría-García’s data
comes from a “multilingual corpus --- containing more than 350 calls
to the call centre of a Spanish insurance company” (p. 277). In the
two calls that she analyses, the customers speak English, and an
interpreter is involved. The first call concerns hiring a car, and the
second call concerns renovating a house. Santamaría-García is
interested, among other things, in how the callers respect or do not
respect the agent’s (first call) and the interpreters’ (both calls)
face. The first caller explicitly says: “I am extremely dissatisfied,
not with you personally, but … er … You know.” (P. 279.) However, the
second caller is so angry that she eventually hangs up before any
agreement is reached. Another feature of the calls that
Santamaría-García pays attention to are lists and repetition, which
“aggravate the level of affront” (p. 290), among other things.
The book closes with an “epilogue”, a chapter by Miriam A. Locher
titled, “Revisiting the sociopragmatics of emotion”. Locher begins the
chapter by stating that the volume under review “succeeds in
addressing an important interdisciplinary research interface” (p.
297), then proceeds to problematizing some of its key concepts, and
closes by suggesting future venues of research. The chapter focuses on
the concepts of evaluation, relationships, and morality, which Locher
discusses based on her own previous research and the research
presented in the volume. Moreover, Locher dedicates a section to what
she calls “Observables and multimodality”. As regards observables, the
chapter includes a figure that Locher has titled “Emotion as a
syndrome complex”. It summarizes the cycle of emotion from stimulus
through reaction and regulation to expression which in turn can become
a new stimulus for emotion. In the figure, reaction includes a somatic
reaction, an appraisal, and a feeling (p. 299).
EVALUATION
To return to the first chapter of the volume, Alba-Juez and Haugh
state that “emotions are inherently social phenomena” (with an
emphasis on “social”, p. 9). This is something that many other
scholars would agree on (e.g. Peräkylä & Sorjonen 2012, Prior & Kasper
2016, Robles & Weatherall 2021). Alba-Juez and Haugh also state that
“emotions are inherently cultural phenomena” (with an emphasis on
“cultural”, p. 9). Again, this is something that many other scholars
would agree on (e.g. Kövecses 2000, Wierzbicka 1999, Yu 1995). Indeed,
Alba-Juez and Haugh themselves discuss both discourse analytic and
interactional studies of emotion as predecessors to their book,
including Mackenzie and Alba-Juez’s (2019) volume “Emotion in
discourse”.
What distinguishes the book under review from the other texts
mentioned in the previous paragraph is the emphasis on
sociopragmatics. Alba-Juez and Haugh call this a “relatively new
approach” (p. 6). Indeed, the first handbook in sociopragmatics,
edited by Haugh, Kádár, and Terkourafi, was published as recently as
in 2021. The handbook suggests that sociopragmatics lies at the
intersections of linguistics and sociology, on the one hand, and of
sociolinguistics and pragmatics, on the other (Haugh, Kádár &
Terkourafi 2021b). The handbook also makes a distinction between
pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics as branches of general
pragmatics. Haugh, Kádár and Terkourafi (2021b: 4), as well as
Alba-Juez and Haugh (volume under review, p. 18), attribute this
distinction to Leech (1983: 11), meaning that the term sociopragmatics
goes back to the 1980s. In that sense, the approach is not very new.
The abovementioned handbook of sociopragmatics includes a chapter by
Alba-Juez (2021) on “Affect and emotion”. Among other things, she
already discusses an idea there that is repeated several times in the
volume under review, the distinction between “emotion talk” and
“emotional talk” that is attributed to Bednarek (2008). Strictly
speaking, it is not Bednarek’s own idea. Rather, Bednarek traces the
idea to many further authors (2008: 10). In any case, we can
distinguish between talk about emotions (“emotion talk”) and
expression of emotions (“emotional talk”; these are just a couple of
ways of putting it), and the volume under review focuses on the latter
kind of talk.
Because I have specialized on emotion talk rather than emotional talk
(e.g., Tissari 2017), my main question when reading “The
sociopragmatics of emotion” is how the authors identify the emotions
that are being expressed. This question is especially pertinent
considering, for example, Alba-Juez’s remark that “in many cases, who
or what is being evaluated or emoted is not mentioned in the co-text
at all” (p. 46).
The book gives some answers to my question. For example, Miller, Ergül
and Attardo pay attention to “facial expression, as well as head,
hand, and other relevant body movements” (p. 200) in their study of
embarrassment, and the customer in Santamaría-García’s study tells the
representative of the insurance company that she is “so, so angry” (p.
284). In the latter case, emotion talk and emotional talk both come
into play. The main answer that the book gives nevertheless appears to
be the idea of the three dimensions of emotional talk, evaluation,
relationships, and morality. Even though these dimensions are
problematized in the book, the authors take it for granted that they
know what kind of evaluation, relationships and morality issues are
relevant to their data.
In the future, it would be interesting to see more collaboration
between scholars whose research focuses on emotion talk and scholars
who focus on emotional talk. The former could contribute, among other
things, with their models of such emotions as anger (e.g. Kövecses &
Sullivan 2025: 100-105) or embarrassment (e.g. Wierzbicka 1999: 115).
It would be interesting to see if the two strands of research would
converge or diverge, for example, in their understanding of these two
emotions. Should there be convergence, it would lend more credibility
to both strands of research, and this would be in line with Alba-Juez
and Haugh’s comment that a “single approach or even a single
discipline” (p. 30) is not enough to explain emotion.
I have also mentioned two other ideas that Alba-Juez and Haugh present
in their introduction, among many. One was the idea that not only
experience of emotion leads to its display, but also that display of
emotion leads to its experience (p. 14). The other was that
“[e]motions are inherently unpredictable phenomena” (p. 16). It is
interesting to consider these ideas in the light of the rest of the
chapters of the book.
I will first give a couple of examples of passages which discuss the
display of emotions. Larina suggests that the reason why the Russian
informants do not provide as profuse leave-taking formulas as the
British English speakers is their “greater commitment to sincerity”
(p. 187). This clashes somewhat with the idea that people experience
the emotions that they display. Carranza in her turn, in her
discussion of courtroom emotions, talks about the authenticity of
emotion displays on the one hand, and the possibility of using
emotions as “signs that can be manipulated” (p. 237), on the other.
As regards the unpredictability versus predictability of emotions, I
would say that for the chapters in the book to work, there needs to be
a certain degree of predictability of emotions. Otherwise, the authors
could not judge which emotions appear in their data and which emotions
are considered moral. To give an example, Ran and Fan discuss the
Chinese concept of “qíngmiàn” which, according to them, refers to the
‘mutual affection-based face’ (p. 152). This concept would make little
sense if people could not predict each other’s emotions to some
extent.
The ideas that I picked up from the introduction are a little random,
but they illustrate aspects of coherence in the volume. There is no
complete coherence in the sense of all chapters agreeing with each
other, but there is plenty of coherence in the sense that there are
both themes running  through the whole book and themes occurring in
more than one chapter. A further aspect of coherence is that the lists
of references in the chapters overlap; I will return to this later.
At the beginning of this review, I also quoted Alba-Juez and Haugh’s
wish that their book “illustrate what a sociopragmatic perspective
brings to the broader scholarly understanding of emotion and its role
in social life” and to “lay the foundations for a sociopragmatic
theorization of emotion” (p. 7). The book succeeds well in
illustrating the sociopragmatic perspective. Here I agree with Locher
who writes (p. 306): “The chapters in this book do not present a
unified methodology, which I consider a strength since its readers can
learn from the different ways that this topic can be approached ---.”
Considering the relatively recent publication of “The Cambridge
handbook of sociopragmatics” (Haugh, Kádár & Terkourafi 2021), the
latter wish is very understandable as well. However, while the book
certainly plays an important role in the “sociopragmatic theorization
of emotion”, other works have also contributed to its foundations
(e.g., Brown & Levinson 1987, Leech 1983, Martin & White 2005). It is
interesting to note which texts are repeatedly referred to. One such
text is an “unpublished” PhD dissertation that several of the authors
of “The sociopragmatics of emotion” seem to have read (Sandlund 2004;
see pp. 36, 217, 271). Another such text is Ruusuvuori’s chapter on
emotion and affect from “The handbook of conversation analysis”
(2012/2013; see pp. 36, 217, 270).
To conclude, this book can be recommended to anyone interested in
emotional talk and even to anyone interested in emotion talk,
considering that these phenomena are interconnected. More
specifically, this is an important book for pragmaticians, discourse
analysts and conversation analysts interested in emotions. Lastly, the
book or parts of it could also be used as course literature in a
course about the language of emotions.
REFERENCES
Alba-Juez, Laura. 2021. Affect and emotion. In: Michael Haugh, Dániel
Z. Kádár & Marina Terkourafi (eds.). The Cambridge handbook of
sociopragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 340-362.
Bednarek, Monika. 2008. Emotion talk across corpora. London: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Brown, Penelope & Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some
universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Haugh, Michael, Dániel Z. Kádár & Marina Terkourafi (eds.). 2021a. The
Cambridge handbook of sociopragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Haugh, Michael, Dániel Z. Kádár & Marina Terkourafi. 2021b.
Introduction: Directions in sociopragmatics. In: Michael Haugh, Dániel
Z. Kádár & Marina Terkourafi (eds.). The Cambridge handbook of
sociopragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1-12.
Kelly, Kristine M. & Warren H. Jones. 1997. Assessment of
dispositional embarrassability. Anxiety, Stress, & Coping 10(4).
307-333.
Kövecses, Zoltán. 2000. Metaphor and emotion: Language, culture, and
body in human feeling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kövecses, Zoltán & Karen Sullivan. 2025. Anger in American English: “A
thousand thousand red hot suns”. In: Zoltan Kövecses, Réka Benczes &
Veronika Szelid (eds.). Metaphors of ANGER across Languages:
Universality and Variation. Volume 1: From Akan to Italian. Berlin:
Walter de Gruyter. 51-109.
Leech, Geoffrey N. 1983. Principles of pragmatics. London & New York:
Longman.
Mackenzie, J. Lachlan & Laura Alba-Juez (eds.). 2019. Emotion in
discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Martin, James R. & Peter R. R. White. 2005. The language of
evaluation: Appraisal in English. Houndmills & New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Peräkylä, Anssi & Marja-Leena Sorjonen (eds.). 2012. Emotion in
interaction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Prior, Matthew T. & Gabriele Kasper (eds.). 2016. Emotion in
multilingual interaction. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Robles, Jessica S. & Ann Weatherall (eds.). 2021. How emotions are
made in talk. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Ruusuvuori, Johanna. 2012/2013. Emotion, affect and conversation. In:
Jack Sidnell & Tanya Stivers (eds.). The handbook of conversation
analysis. Malden, MA & Oxford, UK: Blackwell. 330-349.
Sandlund, Erica. 2004. Feeling by doing: The social organization of
everyday emotions in academic talk-in-interaction. PhD dissertation.
Karlstad: Karlstad University Studies.
<https://kau.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:5467/FULLTEXT01.pdf>
Tissari, Heli. 2017. Current emotion research in English linguistics:
Words for emotions in the history of English. Emotion Review 9(1).
86-94. DOI: 10.1177/1754073916632064.
Wierzbicka, Anna. 1999. Emotions across languages and cultures:
Diversity and universals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Yu, Ning. 1995. Metaphorical expressions of anger and happiness in
English and Chinese. Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 10(2). 59-92.
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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