Abstract
Research on the facial expression of emotions has become a bone of contention in psychological research. On the one hand, Ekman and his colleagues have argued for a universal set of six basic emotions that are recognized with a considerable degree of accuracy across cultures and automatically displayed in highly similar ways by people. On the other hand, more recent research in cognitive science has provided results that are supportive of a cultural-relativist position. In this paper this controversy is approached from a contrastive perspective on phraseological constructions. It focuses on how emotional displays are codified in somatic idioms in some European (English, German, French, Spanish) and East Asian (Japanese, Korean, Chinese [Cantonese]) languages. Using somatic idioms such as make big eyes or die Nase rümpfen as a pool of evidence to shed linguistic light on the psychological controversy, the paper engages with the following general research question: Is there a significant difference between European and East Asian somatic idioms or do these constructions rather speak for a universal apprehension of facial emotion displays? To answer this question, the paper compares somatic expressions that are selected from (idiom) dictionaries of the languages listed above. Moreover, native speakers of the East Asian languages were consulted to support the analysis of the respective data. All corresponding entries were analysed categorically, i. e. with regard to whether or not they encode a given facial area to denote a specific emotion. The results show arguments both for and against the universalist and the cultural-relativist positions. In general, they speak for an opportunistic encoding of facial emotion displays.
Highlights
Phraseologists have long argued that idiomatic expressions have the function of conceptualizing the world of experience of in a pre-established linguistic format
This paper explores the very special case of how somatic idioms encode the facial emotion displays and how they map the semantic space of emotion categories
Constructions are seen as being coupled with complex semantic, pragmatic, and discourse-functional properties (Croft and Cruse 2004: 258). In line with this idea, one can assume that somatic idioms that encode facial expressions of emotions map a multidimensional conceptual space of emotion categories – as sketched by Plutchik – that are further related to corresponding facial actions
Summary
Phraseologists have long argued that idiomatic expressions have the function of conceptualizing the world of experience of in a pre-established linguistic format. The paper adopts a contrastive perspective to scrutinize phraseological constructions from four European (English, German, French, Spanish) and three East Asian (Japanese, Chinese [Cantonese], Korean) languages to find out how they encode facial expressions of emotions The motivation for this comparison resides in a psychological controversy centred about the universality or cultural relativity of facial emotion displays. The results of Jack et al.’s (2009) study are discussed as they provide the most important point of departure for my own empirical engagement with the controversy by means of two case studies that are offered in Sections 5 and 6 In the former I will first deal with research question A and scrutinize how facial expressions of emotions are codified in English alone. For Case Study B native speakers were consulted as informants to support the collection and analysis of the respective data. To close the paper, the implications of the two cases studies and potential routes for further research are addressed in the conclusion
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