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In:Emotion in Language: Theory – research – application
Edited by Ulrike M. Lüdtke
[Consciousness & Emotion Book Series 10] 2015
► pp. 157–174

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Language and emotion

The cognitive linguistic perspective

Published online: 16 December 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ceb.10.08sch
In this article, the relationship between language and emotion is explained within the theoretical framework of the critical cognitive linguistic approach. According to cognitive linguists both emotion and language are seen as complex mental systems consisting of different knowledge subsystems that interact in manifold ways. First, the paper discusses some fundamental issues concerning language, cognition and emotion, giving an outline of some areas of recent cognitive linguistic research. The focus is on the characterization of emotion as the evaluative mental system within our cognitive apparatus. Some crucial methodological and theoretical considerations with regard to the relationship of language and emotions are outlined. The paper then concentrates on the analysis of the affective potential in text and discourse. Accounting for the large range of linguistic features that serve to express emotion and evaluation, it is shown that feelings and judgments can be conveyed explicitly, through lexical items and grammatical structures or implicitly, through ideational meanings. Implicitly conveyed evaluations have to be inferred by drawing specific emotive implicatures. Such e-implicatures depend on emotional representations that are based on culturally shaped encyclopedic knowledge. In those cases, the utterance is articulated in order to give an affective judgment about the referent or state-of-affairs in question and reveals the attitude of the speaker.
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