Vol 22, No 1 (2018): The discourse of emotions

The purpose of the article is to show the development of scientific thought that leads to the origin and definition of the concept of “language personality”. Attention is drawn to the fact that up to the 1970s emotions had been completely excluded from the scope of linguistic attention. With the advent of an-thropocentric linguistics, emotions were recognized as the human being focal point, but linguists’ atten-tion was still attracted merely to the language of homo loquens / sentiens - the emotional component was missing. Therefore, the objectives of the article are as follows: 1) to present and discuss the develop-ment of the Language Personality Theory; 2) to prove the necessity of including the emotive component into the concept of the language personality structure; 3) to substantiate the introduction of the new term - “emotionally-communicative personality”, which logically fits into the terminological system of mod-ern communicology and emphasizes its communicative significance. The theoretical material includes nu-merous works devoted to the problem of language personality, beginning from V.V. Vinogradov (the 1930s) to G.I. Bogin, Yu.N. Karaulov (the 1980s), from the 1990s to the present O.A. Dmitrieva, I.A. Murzi-nova (2015); Shakhovsky, 2000; V.I. Shakhovskiy (2008 a&b); A.A. Shteba (2014) and many others. To my knowledge, the notion of language personality has not been discussed by foreign linguists. Another block of theoretical material is dedicated to the problem of the language and emotion correlation. Russian linguistics has been researching this problem since 1969. Main results of these studies can be found in the works of V.I. Shakhovsky, from (1969 to present), S.V. Ionova (1998, 2015), N.A. Krasavsky (2001), T.V. Larina (2009, 2015), and Ya.A. Volkova (2014) among others. The problem of the language and emotion correlation is varied in its formulation - the language of emotions or language and emotions: A. Schleicher, 1869; Ch. Bali, 1944; A. Binet, 1946; F. Daneṧ, 1987; B. Volek, 1987; R. Dirven, 1997; S. Niemeier, 1997; A. Wierzbicka, 1999 and others. The main research methods used in the article are the critical analysis of theoretical studies, by means of the hypothetical-deductive method, and the scientific intuition of the author of the article. It is found that 1) Language Personality Theory is many-faced but does not constitute a full picture of the described phenomenon, which does not, in its turn, allow to accept a common definition of the language personality; 2) due to the development of emotive linguistics and the theory of communication, it is obvious that there is a lack of the structure-emotive component in the language personality matrix. Also, due to the emergence and rapid development of the linguistics of emo-tions and the theory of communication, a gap in the structure of the language personality has become evident - namely, the absence of the emotional structural component in its model (matrix). In this regard, the article provides argumentation to support the introduction of a new term - “emotionally-communicative personality”, as well as an attempt to describe the cognitive matrix of the emotionally-communicative per-sonality along with the term “language personality”. The new term completes the term “language persona-lity”; 3) the structural emotive component of language personality allows to explain how language per-sonality can be ecological or non-ecological; 4) the term “matrix” helps explaining the emotive-cognitive intellectual competence of homo loquens / homo sentiens.

Feelings and emotions, typically non-propositional, play an important part in the eventual quality of the interpretations to which they are attached. However, relevance theory has preferred to focus on how hearers build up propositions that fill the gap between what is meant and what is eventually inter-preted (Carston 2002). These are easier to handle, possess a mental representation and are a genuine ob-ject of analysis for linguistics (Chapman 2001, García-Carpintero 2010, Moeschler 2009). In this paper, a review is provided of several ways in which feelings and emotions play an important part in the even-tual quality of interpretations, specifically focusing on irony (Yus 2016a, 2016b) and Internet-mediated communication (Yus 2016c, forthcoming).

Risk communication is grounded in both rationality and emotion (Fischhoff & Kadvany 2011, Bo-holm & Corvellec 2014). Recent investigations have proved that emotions do affect risk and danger percep-tions by functioning as ‘mediators’ (Xie et al. 2011) and become important in decision-making. My study explores how emotion is induced by the National Transportation Safety Board of the United States of America (NTSB for short) to influence the mentalities and behaviours of its broad mixed audience and thus increase risk prevention. With that research purpose in mind, I examine an electronic corpus of over 500 online samples of fatal aviation dockets issued yearly online by the NTSB between the time span 2010-2015 and contained in its website databases. The emotional engagement deployed to mediate the perceptions of risk and danger by the general public constitutes a unique genre among all other world transportation agencies, since through informative vividness it pursues to activate the processes of memory, inference (i.e. judgement) and decision-making. I take Stubbs’ (2001) concept of ‘discursive prosody’ as point of departure and resort to a blended theoretical framework that combines Narratology, Corpus Linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, and Proximisation (Cap 2013) and Positioning (Harré & van Langenhove 1999) Theories. I will show that the NTSB’s emotional prosody is more rhetorical than lexical and that the narrative strategies of focalisation and speech representation play a salient role. To conclude I will reflect on some of the possible consequences of over-exploiting emotional engagement in risk communication.

The aim of this paper is to examine the connection among fustigation impoliteness - a type of impo-liteness within Kaul de Marlangeon’s (2005, 2008) and Kaul de Marlangeon & Alba-Juez (2012) taxono-my of impolite acts, emotions and extimacy, focusing on Argentine media celebrities of the Río de la Plata cultural context. This article highlights the phenomenon of speaker’s or hearer’s extimacy as a vo-litional form within an aggressive relationship, used for the promotion of the speaker’s ego through me-dia exhibitionism that enlarges one’s own and others’ intimacy and sharing with the public. Within a prag-matic sociocultural approach, this work intends, on the one hand, to investigate fustigation impoliteness as a usual practice of violent public interactions of media celebrities, and on the other hand to consider when such expressions are due to the extimacy of the speaker or to that attributed to or imposed on the hearer or on a third party by the speaker.

REVIEW of Laura Alba-Juez and J. Lachlan Mackenzie. 2016. Pragmatics: Cognition, Context & Culture. Madrid: McGraw Hill, 307p.

Materials of the CONFERENCE ON EUROLINGUISTICS “EUROPEAN PHILOLOGY AND SOCIETAL ISSUES” at VHS Donauwörth, Germany,29 september - 1 october 2017.