Language of Emotion and Thinking in Kavalan and Saisiyat
Date Issued
2007
Date
2007
Author(s)
Hsieh, Fu-Hui
DOI
en-US
Abstract
This study demonstrates an attempt to explore the language of emotion and thought, two of the most important mental activities of a person. Numerous studies are devoted to the study of emotion languages. By contrast, few studies are found to exploring the talks of the thinking. However, even fewer studies are aimed at putting together and investigating these two important mental activities and experiences of human beings. This might be attributed to a prejudiced western view which views emotion and thinking, or rationality, as two experiences that belong to two mutually exclusive domains. However, Damasio’s (1994) neurophysiological cases convince us that the bifurcated view of emotion and thought, or feeling and thinking, as two isolated aspects of a person’s mental experiences is in essence incorrect.
Moreover, contrary to what is claimed in previous studies on language of emotion and thought that conceptual metaphor appears to be a universally preferred strategy in conceptualizing abstract concepts, Huang’s (2002a) study on Tsou and our study on emotion language in Saisiyat reveals that metaphorical expression may not be a universally preferred strategy in doing so. Based on their experiments, psychologists, e.g. Barsalou (1999), urge on us the need of the direct, non-metaphorical representation of abstract concepts. We thus propose that grammatical model may be a better way to get a clearer picture of how emotion events are construed in the language.
Our study on the construal of emotion events investigates how event participants are construed in an emotion event via the case marking assignment. It reveals that the FEAR event appears to be distinctive in that its Cause can be generic. To the contrary, the ANGRY event shows its distinctiveness in that its Cause is always specific, or at least referential. The Causes construed in different syntactic constructions are different (Dirven 1995, 1997). AF-clauses code a neutral Cause in Saisiyat and Kavalan. PF/LF clauses take a Target-Cause in both languages. It is a remote Cause, an indirect Cause, that is coded in the RF clauses in Saisiyat. And the pa(k)- Causative clause encodes an Agent-Cause, who does something on purpose to provoke the Experiencer’s emotional state. Furthermore, Kavalan uses the tu maqzi ‘(starting) from here’ construction to encode a Source Cause, and makes use of the pasazui ‘toward there’ construction to encode a Goal Cause. Moreover, different syntactic constructions profile different event participants. AF-clauses profile the Experiencer. PF/LF-clauses profile the Cause. In the RF-construction, it is the Affectee that gets profiled.
A study of emotion language should not exclude the study of affective features in the language. Language of affect includes those linguistic features that the speaker uses to communicate attitudinal information, relating to the emotional or mental state of the speakers. The linguistic strategies selected by Kavalan and Saisiyat to convey affect are very different: Kavalan employs more lexical strategies, especially interjections and particles, deployment of first personal plural pronouns, reported speech, and lexicon-schema, to represent the language user’s affective state. Saisiyat has affect conveyed in one particular grammatical construction, i.e. the si-construction. In this construction, there are two sub-events: Event 1 is the si-clause, which encodes a percept functioning as an affect-trigger, and Event 2 is the affect triggered in the perceiver via perceptual experiences, who may take an action or enter into some certain state as a result. Whenever a si-construction is used, there is always an affect conveyed across on the perceiver via perceptual experiences.
Based on the six dimensions proposed by Goddard (2003), we explore the thinking verbs in both Kavalan and Saisiyat in relation to syntactic patterns, lexical polysemy, and metaphorical extensions. The KNOWING verbs in both languages appear to be distinctive in that the three Saisiyat KNOWING verbs, i.e. ra:am ‘know’, sekla’ ‘know for sure’ and haSa’ ‘not know’, fall naturally into a group in terms of the syntactic behaviors: they are negated by the stative negator ’okik, and there is a stative morpheme –k- in their causative, nominalization, and the si-(RF) form. This may imply that these three KNOWING verbs are treated more like stative verbs than the other thinking verbs in Saisiyat. The KNOWING verbs in Kavalan distinguish themselves from the other thinking verbs in the ma-forms. While the ma-forms of the other thinking verbs in Kavalan behave like LF verbs, those of the knowing verbs, i.e. supaR ‘know’ and Rayngu ‘not know’, behave like AF verbs and denote a past event or experience. Moreover, both languages have more words in both positive and negative aspects of the KNOWING domain than in the other thinking domains. Both languages have monomorphemic words to denote the mental activities in the negative aspect, i.e. forgetting, of REMEMBERING, and have negation of forgetting to denote the mental activities of remembering. Finally, the THINKING verbs in these two languages are extended from thinking to feeling.
Regarding the ethnotheory of the person, the Kavalan anem ‘heart’ refers to the visceral organ and at the same time the locus of emotion and thought. An understanding of the concept of the Kavalan heart requires an understanding of the socio-culture aspects. Kavalan uses the same place, i.e. anem, for the locus of all cognitive activities. Although Kavalan has a thinking verb qasianem ‘think’, they conceptually conceive that all the mental activities reside in anem ‘heart’. The Kavalan anem ‘heart’ is indeed the container of the content called emo-cognition; and anem ‘heart’ in Kavalan, conceptualized as an integrated emo-cognizer, is responsible for all the mental activities of thinking and feeling.
Saisiyat tells a different story. The concept of heart is of little significance in Saisiyat physiologically and conceptually. Physiologically, the Saisiyat people do not feel a:oe’ ‘heart’ hurt, but feel ka:ala’ ‘chest’ hurt, instead. Conceptually, neither the visceral organ a:oe’ ‘heart’ nor the body part ka:ala’ ‘chest’ provides a ground for emotion or thinking in Saisiyat. The Saisiyat people use ’inaz’azem ‘thought’ to denote a broad range of the mental activities of thinking and feeling. However, the use of ’inaz’azem ‘thought’ in the related metaphorical expressions denotes the way one thinks, rather than the way one feels. And the Saisiyat appears not to have their ’inaz’azem ‘thought’ reside in any body part, although it is believed to be related to ta’oeloeh ‘head’ or tono’ ‘brain’. Nonetheless, it shall not lead us to falsely conclude that it is not embodied. It is embodied, since it relies on bodily experiences to make sense the mental activities of ’inaz’azem ‘thought’ in Saisiyat. Compared with the Kavalan anem ‘heart’, which is conceptualized as an integrated emo-cognizer, the Saisiyat ’inaz’azem ‘thought’ is conceptualized more as a cognizer penetrated with feeling.
Both Saisiyat and Kavalan have special syntax regarding the expressions related to somatic illnesses. In these particular expressions, Saisiyat seems to treat the affected body parts as alienable parts, which are independent of the whole, i.e. the person. Kavalan, to the contrary, displays more like an inalienable possession on the affected body parts, as the affected body part is always coded as a location of the whole.
Overall, our investigation of how natural languages structure two of the most important mental activities and experiences of a person, i.e. emotion and thought, has shown that these two are not separate domains in a person’s mentality. As remarked by Damasio (1994), although thinking and feeling processes and states may be expressed as separable at some basic level of human existence, they indeed operate together to a very significant degree in our daily life. Moreover, by studying the language of emotion, we get a better picture on how language users construe emotion events; in other words, we know their perspectives and their interpretations toward the event in question via the grammatical construction they select in coding this event. By investigating linguistic features that characterize affective system in a language, we understand more about interactional cues in the discourse. By exploring the talks of thinking in languages, we know better the meta-cognitive structure. By taking into consideration the ethnotheory of the PERSON, we set an integrated view on the study of language of emotion and thinking, as it is the person that makes all the emotions and thinking possible and sensible.
Subjects
language of emotion
talk of thinking
grammatical model
affective system
ethnotheory of person
SDGs
Type
other
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