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Article published In: Review of Cognitive Linguistics
Vol. 18:1 (2020) ► pp.42–74

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Exploring the cultural conceptualization of emotions across national language varieties

A multifactorial profile-based account of pride in European and Brazilian Portuguese

 | Catholic University of Portugal
Published online: 17 August 2020
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https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.00050.soa
Abstract
Supporting the hypothesis that emotions are culturally constructed, this article compares the cultural conceptualization of pride in European and Brazilian Portuguese (EP/BP). Individualistic/collectivistic as well as other cultural influences that determine the conceptual variation of pride in pluricentric Portuguese are examined. Adopting a sociocognitive view of language and applying a multifactorial usage-feature and profile-based methodology, this study combines a feature-based qualitative analysis of 500 occurrences of orgulho ‘pride’ and vaidade ‘vanity’ from a corpus of blogs with their subsequent multivariate statistic modeling. The multiple correspondence analysis reveals two clusters of features, namely, self-centered pride and other-directed pride. Logistic regression confirmed that EP appears to be more associated with other-directed pride, which is in line with the more collectivist and restrained Portuguese culture, whereas BP is more connected with self-centered pride. Accordingly, morally good pride is salient in EP. Brazil’s high power distance can also explain the prominence of negative and bad pride in BP.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Cultural variation of pride: Individualistic and collectivistic influences
  • 3.Corpus data and methodology
    • 3.1Material
    • 3.2Multifactorial usage-feature and profile analysis
    • 3.3Multivariate quantitative methods
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Multiple correspondence analysis: Self-centered pride vs. other-directed pride
    • 4.2Logistic regression: Significant predictors for EP and BP national varieties
    • 4.3Good and bad pride
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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