Emotion and emotionality as a hidden dimension of lexicon and discourse

Abstract

In her thought-provoking article, Aneta Pavlenko approaches emotion and emotion-laden words in the bilingual lexicon from an impressive number of different perspectives. This is particularly welcome, since most models of linguistic structure do not account for emotional meanings in a systematic way. One exception worth mentioning, however, is Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL; Halliday, 1985/1994) with its broad division of functions into the textual, ideational and interpersonal metafunctions. Whereas the textual metafunction is concerned with the flow of information and the ideational with the construction of experience, the interpersonal function is concerned with interaction between people including the sharing of feelings. Recently, this last aspect has been developed more on the basis of SFL within Appraisal theory (Martin and White 2005), where attitudinal meanings are divided into Affect (the construal of emotion into the frameI feel(very) __), Judgment (social/moral evaluation of people) and Appreciation (aesthetic evaluation of things). The theory has primarily been applied to the development of the expression of feeling and evaluation in student writing in schools, based on qualitative analysis of corpora. The framework has also recently been applied to other languages than English as in Folkeryd (2006), who shows how the expression of affect and other evaluative resources are used in various story genres by Swedish students in grades 5, 8 and 11. The expression of attitudinal meanings turned out to be a problem characteristic of low-achieving students. This study includes bilingual students but they are not focused on in the published work.