Language and emotions
Emotions are complicated.....
Not just experiencing emotions is complicated, understanding them is, too.
The problem with emotions – like with many other phenomena we experience daily –
is that we think we know what we are talking about.
When I started reading the scholarship on emotion I learned (among other things) that emotions are complicated. And I learned that surprise (for example) is not classified as an emotion by everyone. Rather, surprise is sometimes viewed as an epistemic state (which can trigger an emotion, but is not itself one).
In fact, not everyone in the world of affective science assumes that there are primitives that are to be classified as "an emotion". This is because they have reasons to think that emotions are constructed.
...and why we should care!
We often find linguistic descriptions suggesting that a particular unit of language, or construction, or category expresses an emotion. For example, exclamatives (like "What a complex phenomenon!") are sometimes described as expressing the emotion of surprise.
But if the experts are having a difficult time classifying emotions, then we should be careful in classifying parts of language as being dedicated to expressing a particular emotion.
Emotion in language
Under construction