Abstract
This review addresses classic and new approaches to the relationships between emotion and language in multilingual contexts. I first discuss prevalent ideologies that treat emotion as biological and individual, and language as only referential. I then discuss a more fully semiotic view of the relationship between language and emotion that can productively inform examinations of the relationship between multilingualism and emotion. Multilingual displays, interpretations, and experiences of emotion have been studied at three analytic levels: interactions, communities, and individuals. Emotion does not only reside in individual psychobiology but also in semiotically (verbally and nonverbally) mediated social interactions. Emotion can then be treated as simultaneously embodied, social, and semiotically mediated.
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Notes
- 1.
I use will use emotion and affect interchangeably, following Wilce (2009).
- 2.
See Gal 2005 for analysis of discursive and cultural constructions of the private/public distinction.
- 3.
This contrasts with Pavlenko (2008) who argues for the existence of a domain of emotion-laden words.
- 4.
Pavlenko (2008) discusses other dimensions of individual bilingualism and emotion, to include bilinguals’ lexical resources for talking about emotion, and less referentially explicit “emotion-laden” forms, such as interjections.
- 5.
One can triangulate such reports with other methods, such as asking other bilinguals to react to and discuss recorded storytellers’ affective displays (Koven 2007). Bilingual listeners found recorded bilingual speakers sounded like different types of people in French versus Portuguese, whom they imaginatively situated in French and Portuguese sociocultural landscapes.
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Koven, M. (2015). Language Awareness and Emotion. In: Cenoz, J., Gorter, D., May, S. (eds) Language Awareness and Multilingualism. Encyclopedia of Language and Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02325-0_5-1
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