EMOTIONS AND MULTILINGUALISM, Aneta Pavlenko

Abstract

EMOTIONS AND MULTILINGUALISM. Aneta Pavlenko. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. v + 304. $90.00 cloth.Pavlenko's preface captures one's attention immediately. She believes that writing about human beings should include personal as well as scholarly insights. She then proceeds to demonstrate the value of the personal perspective, beginning with her own bilingual experience as a student of linguistics. She reports that, as a student, she continually asked questions of her teachers about bilingual issues because they were marginalized in her training. As a result of this marginalization, she is firmly committed to exposing the monolingual bias in all areas of linguistic research; she also rejects the view that language is a static system. Emotions, she argues, have been undertheorized in bilingual studies and SLA. Pavlenko brings new attention to research from SLA, bilingual studies, ethnographies, psycholinguistics, psychology, neurophsychology, memoirs, and anecdotes from her own life. The methodologies and research questions differ, as do the definitions of emotion in these fields. Pavlenko presents a comprehensive examination of relevant literature in all of these areas and frames that exploration with probing questions and results from her own research (a Web-based survey) and experience. She examines both emotion terms and emotion repertoires and asks: For multilingual speakers, are these repertoires distinct? Do they refer to universal notions of emotion varying only in their linguistic expression?