Research Seminar
The birth of 'emotion'. A diachronic studyDirk GeeraertsFaculteit Letteren, KU Leuven | |
| Abstract: | The embodiment hypothesis, a cornerstone of much thinking in Cognitive Linguistics, has given rise to a renewed interest in the interaction between cultural factors and embodied experience. In the well-known studies on the concept "anger", an early assumption of a universalist physiological basis (Lakoff & Johnson 1987) gave way to a more nuanced approach when it was established that the emotion vocabulary in English is to a large extent determined by the historically traceable, culturally specific influence of the theory of humors (Geeraerts & Grondelaers 1995, Gevaert 2005; and see Sharifian 2003, Kövceses 2005 for current views). In this paper, we will take the exploration of the influence of the humoral theory one step further, and show that the word emotion itself, etymologically speaking, derives from the theory of humors. Taking into account that emotion in English is a loan from French and that French émotion is itself derived from the verb émouvoir, we will primarily trace the emergence of the psychological meaning of émouvoir. Based on a corpus of roughly 4000 observations of the verbs mouvoir and émouvoir in Old and Middle French texts, complemented with 18000 attestations taken from 16th, 17th and 18th century sources, we will show the following. 1. Both verbs are largely synonymous in Old French and Middle French; the specification of émouvoir for psychological readings is a quantitative and gradual one, which reached its completion only in the Modern French period. 2. Humoral factors play a crucial role as bridging contexts between spatial and psychological readings: the movement of the humoral fluids in the body physiologically causes an emotive reaction. 3. The gradual specialisation of émouvoir for psychological meanings has its basis in the fact that in its literal readings, this verb refers more than mouvoir to stationary turbulent movements (and such movements are typical for fluid masses, like the humors). 4. The semantic shift towards psychological meanings correlates with a formal shift in the constructional patterns of the two verbs, defined in terms of the relative frequency of intransitive, transitive and reflexive constructions, and the type of arguments filling those structures. These results will be situated against the background of the scientific theory of the humors as it existed in the Middle Ages. References Geeraerts, Dirk, and Stefan Grondelaers. 1995. Looking back at anger. Cultural traditions and metaphorical patterns. In Language and the Construal of the World, John R. Taylor, and Robert E. MacLaury (eds.), 153-179. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Gevaert, Caroline 2005. The anger is heat question: Detecting cultural influence on the conceptualization of anger through diachronic corpus analysis. In Delbecque, N., J. van der Auwera & D. Geeraerts (eds.), Perspectives on Variation. Sociolinguistic, Historical, Comparative195-208. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Kövecses, Zoltán. 2005. Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sharifian, Farzad. 2003. On cultural conceptualisations. Journal of Cognition and Culture 3: 187-207. |
| Date: | Tue Oct 2, 12:15 pm - 1:15 pm |
| Place: | room 00.60 (Department of Psychology, Tiensestraat 102, 3000 Leuven) |