Emotion Verbs and Related Constructions in Taiwan Southern Min: A cognitive Perspective
Date Issued
2013
Date
2013
Author(s)
CHEN, Chiung-Hao
Abstract
Emotion has raised widespread concerns among different fields in recent years. With profound advance made in cognitive linguistics, it has turned over a new leaf of research on emotion expressions, since, instead of being thought of as an irrational behavior and a mere spontaneous psychological response, emotion is investigated to facilitate the understanding of cognitive processing and conceptualization. Hence, the present thesis specifically focuses on the emotion verbs in Taiwan Southern Min (TSM) in an attempt to explicate the relation of cognition to the emotion language.
With the unique morphosyllabic characteristics of Sinitic languages, Taiwan Southern Min has abundant monosyllabic and disyllabic emotion verbs. Five criteria are proposed to filter out eight basic emotion domains, including six negative emotions,氣khi3, 煩hoan5, 驚kiann, 苦khou2, 念liam7,恨hun7,and two positive emotions,愛ai3 and惜sioh, on which disyllabic emotion verbs are classified. The semantic network of monosyllabic emotion verbs shows the verbal polysemy, exhibits no absolute boundaries and gives considerable insights to the prototype concept of emotion. Moreover, based on Johnson-Laird and Oatley’s (1989) classificatory scheme, the disyllabic emotion verbs are mapped to ferret out five semantic fields, which subsume basic and caused emotions, emotional relations, emotional goals, causative emotions and complex emotions.
The multi-framed characterization of each monosyllabic emotion verb and the morphological enrichment of the disyllabic emotion verbs induce us to observe the syntactic manifestation of the emotion verbs. Based on transitivity and the realization of argument roles, four general constructions are derived, including transitive, causative, ES-intransitive and SS-intransitive constructions. It is indicated that the one-to-one correspondence between the verbs and the constructions (i.e., ES-type or SS-type) is upheld for the disyllabic emotion verbs because of the morphological complexity. Results show that the lexical disyllabic emotion verbs tend to explicate the occurrence of emotions from Experiencer’s perspective, which urges us to explore more complex constructions that encode the Stimulus-oriented perspective.
The stimulus-subject constructions denote emotion causation. In addition to the lexical causatives, morphological and analytical causatives are strategized to balance the lack of lexical causatives. As for the morphological causatives, though schematic, they include the restultative-verb compounds (RVCs) and verb-complement compounds (VCCs). They express the intensification of emotion and the evaluation of emotion respectively. Yet, it is the monosyllabic causative verbs,khi3andkiannthat are required for compounding. Other than that, the analytical causative is also a common strategy to express causation in language. Unlimited to the monosyllabic emotion verbs and impermissible to the causative emotion verbs, the construction only registers the stative emotion verbs.
Beyond the lexical scope, we resort to five constructions that are frequently collocated with the emotion verbs in TSM, including EV_KAH construction, EV_CHIT-E construction, HO-LANG_EV construction, BO-SIANN-MIH-THANG_EVconstruction and Disposition construction. They are analyzed in terms of their default lexical patterns, the cognitive operation underlying the semantic structure and the syntactic specification. These specific constructions unearth a very broad rangeof emotion concepts, such as emotion as a cause to the reaction, moods description, personal emotional traits, and evaluation.
After the detailed discussion of the lexical emotion verbs and the constructions they participate in, we looked into three follow-up issues: (a) windowing of attention over the emotion events in TSM, (b) SLP-ILP distinction, and (c) emotional causation. First, the windowing of attention over the emotion events can be cognitively demarcated into three patterns in language: Emotion as Result, Emotion as State and Emotion as Cause, among which Emotion as Result can be manifested in disparate constructions. This substantiates that emotions are often viewed as the endpoint of the event, congruent with the inherent nature of language in favor of the endpoint of event. Furthermore, the gapped portions of the emotion event-frame also exhibit the flexibility of the content retrieval and verbal idiosyncrasy. Second, the emotion verbs are inherently SLPs, while the constructions they may be coerced to ILPs under the constructions they associate with. Third, we delve into the constructions that denote causation. The cognitive conceptualization of the causative and stative emotion verbs and the controllability of subjecthood are compared. The directness and granularity of the emotioncausatives, is stated in terms of Croft’s causal structure model and (1991), a subjectivity continuum model among constructions that denotes emotional causation in terms of Langacker’s viewing arrangement (1991) is formulated in the end.
Subjects
情緒
情緒動詞
構式
事件結構
使役
Type
thesis
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