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
In this open-access paper on language and emotions you can read what I think about language and emotions. I try to contribute to both linguistics and the affective sciences. The core empirical claim I make is that there are no grammatical categories dedicated to encoding emotions. This seems to be universally the case and hence it appears to be no accident. The absence of grammatical categories dedicated to encoding emotions is surprising given the otherwise close connection between language and emotions as evidenced by phylogenetic, ontogenetic, and neurological properties. One might expect such categories to exist, based on cognitive and evolutionary considerations. The conclusion to be drawn is that emotions are not to be considered primitives that could be directly linked to grammatical categories, but instead that emotions are constructed. In this way, the properties of grammar provide new evidence for the theory of constructed emotions. I further argue that linguistic theory may shed light on how emotions are constructed. Specifically, I explore the hypothesis that the same architecture is responsible for the construction of complex linguistic expressions and for the construction of emotions. This opens a novel research agenda, which I refer to as the emotional spine hypothesis, which invites new avenues of interdisciplinary research.