The Language of Emotion in Mandarin Discourse
Date Issued
2007
Date
2007
Author(s)
Hsiao, Chi-hua
DOI
en-US
Abstract
Emotion has long been an interest for researchers in different fields. In the realm of linguistics, the rise of cognitive linguistics has opened a new page of research on emotion because it is regarded as a rich source to understand cognitive processing and conceptualization. This present study, thus, investigates the language of emotion in Mandarin so as to explicate how emotion is conceptualized in discourse.
We first delve into emotion constructions of pervasive occurrences in Mandarin discourse. Six frequently-occurring constructions are represented, including Zhixia Construction of Emotion, DE-yangzi Construction of Emotion, Degree DE Construction of Emotion, Manner DE Construction of Emotion, RANG Construction of Emotion and HEN Construction of Emotion. These constructions are based on different syntactic devices, stretching from one pole mostly specific to emotion events, to the other pole applicable to a wide variety of semantic fields, such as resultative events, causative events and stative description. Emotion, in other words, can be expressed by syntactic patterns exclusively unique to itself and those shared with other semantic fields.
These emotion constructions converge on a systematic structure, and that allows us to register a prototypical Chinese emotion event structure encompassing three stages in a dynamic sequence: [Cause], [Emotion] and [Reaction]. It is demonstrated each emotion construction has a reason for existence in that it profiles different elements and stages of the emotion event structure. Further, we observe that these constructions altogether exhibit three categories of force dynamic patterns in the physical-metaphorical domain, including onset causing of action, extended causing of action and onset causing of rest.
In addition to constructional devices, emotion is richly expressed via metaphor. With conduit metaphor as bedrock, three different types of metaphors are distinguished, including EMOTION IS FOOD, EMOTION IS ORGANISM and EMOTION IS STATE. Within the domain of ORGANISM and STATE, entities in basic levels are further employed as source domains to conceptualize emotion. For EMOTION IS ORGANISM, it includes EMOTION IS PLANT and EMOTION IS ANIMATE BEING; for EMOTION IS STATE, it includes EMOTION IS FLUID, EMOTION IS LOCATION and PHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECTS FOR EMOTION. Among these, EMOTION IS PLANT, EMOTION IS FOOD and emotion as QI subsumed in PHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECTS FOR EMOTION are particular to Mandarin because these expressions reveal the culture tradition on food and Chinese medicine. Moreover, regarding mapping relations between the various source domains and the target domain of EMOTION, it is shown that while function of a source domain is mostly utilized to code causation of an emotion event, essence and quality are particularly favored for emotional states, and all the three elements— essence, quality and function—are available to be transferred to conceptualize reactions.
For the last issue, hyperbolic emotion expressions, a variety of linguistic manners falling into to two categories are utilized: syntactic devices and metaphorical strategies. The syntactic devices include polysyndeton, extreme case formulations and resultative verb compounds. As for metaphor, we suggest that as a conceptual process of reality rather than reality itself, it is the imaginativeness that makes metaphor a useful resource for hyperbole. In addition, on the face of an overwhelming majority of intensification-type of hyperbole, people are disposed to intensity that can relevantly strengthen forces and effects of emotions.
Subjects
情緒, 句構, 事件結構, 隱喻, 誇飾
emotion, construction, event structure, metaphor, hyperbole
Type
other
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