The pragmatics of emotion in socio-cultural contexts: A model for the analysis of David Bowie’s spontaneous memorial in London

Laura Hidalgo-Downing
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

This article develops a pragmatic model for the analysis of emotion in socio-cultural contexts and applies it to the study of the messages written on David Bowie’s mural/memorial in London. The data consists of 584 messages written and drawn on the mural between February and December 2016, after the artist’s death. The model allows for the analysis of the semiotic resources used for the expression of emotive pragmatic acts and their intensification. Results show that all the messages contain emotive pragmatic acts, which include the expression of emotions such as love and missing, the expression of good wishes, blessing, thanking, praise, commitment to remembrance and tribute. Emotive pragmatic acts are expressed mostly verbally but also visually. Emotion is more frequently expressed covertly by figurative means and evoking positive connotations. Emotion is intensified by recurrent lexical (hyperbole) and non-lexical (orthographic, grammatical) means.

Publication history

Date received: 19 March 2024

Date accepted: 19 March 2025

Published online: 31 October 2025

Table of contents

The study of the expression of emotion has been a neglected area of research (Alba-Juez and Mackenzie 2019, 4), but it has gained interest in recent years within pragmatic, discourse-functional and cognitive approaches to the study of discourse (Ochs and Schieffelin 1989; Kövecses 2000; Mackenzie and Alba-Juez 2019). Within functional linguistics and pragmatics, two areas of research have received increased attention. First, the identification of the resources available for the expression of emotion, such as the types of expressive speech acts and the linguistic and paralinguistic (intonation, stress, gesture) mechanisms for the expression of emotion (Foolen 2015). Second, the study of emotion within the broader concepts of stance and appraisal, more specifically, the extent to which emotion may be distinguished from evaluation and the resources for the overt and covert expression of emotion (Martin and White 2005; Alba-Juez 2018). Within cognitive linguistics, the conceptualization of emotion has attracted a lot of attention, given the potentiality of emotions, as complex and often abstract experiences, to be conceptualized in figurative terms, especially by means of metaphor and metonymy (see Lakoff and Turner 1989; Gibbs et al. 2002; Kövecses 2002).

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