Expressing emotion

Abstract

Abstract The acquisition of pragmatic competence, namely, the capability to ‘produce and comprehend […] discourse that is adequate to the L2 socio-cultural context’ (Istvan Kecskes, 2013, p. 64) is a major challenge for learners with a medium-to-advanced level of language proficiency, and a main concern for teachers. To study it, two approaches exist: the ethnopragmatic perspective (Anna Wierzbicka, 2004) and the intercultural pragmatics perspective (Laura Maguire & Jesús Romero-Trillo, 2013). Because of its complexity, the study of emotions is core in pragmatic competence acquisition. This paper explores the way English as a lingua franca (ELF) users with different L1s express their emotions, as compiled in the Corpus of Language and Nature (Romero-Trillo et al., 2013). To do so, 115 texts from L1 German speakers and 115 texts from L1 Brazilian Portuguese speakers are explored following corpus-based and corpus-driven approaches. The former was conducted by analysing the presence in the subcorpora of the items in two emotion word lexicons. To complement the information obtained, further corpus-based analyses of the use of modals and intensifiers employed by the participants to express emotion were conducted. The corpus-driven approach allowed the manual identification of any linguistic unit employed by ELF users to express emotion which had not been previously considered. The results cast light on the linguistic units that ELF users from the two backgrounds employ to express emotion in the same situations. The findings highlight the differences and similarities in their use of the language as well as the suitability of the lexicons to study emotion in ELF.