Russian Emotion Vocabulary in American Learners’ Narratives

Abstract

This study compared the uses of emotion vocabulary in narratives elicited from monolingual speakers of Russian and English and advanced American learners of Russian. Monolingual speakers differed significantly in the distribution of emotion terms across morphosyntactic categories: English speakers favored an adjectival pattern of emotion description, and Russian speakers a verbal one. Advanced American learners of Russian shifted from the adjectival to the verbal pattern in Russian and thus began approximating the usage of native speakers of Russian. At the same time, the data revealed 6 areas where learner usage differed from the monolingual Russian corpus: morphosyntactic transfer from the first language (L1), semantic transfer from the L1, greater use of adverbial constructions, absence of a language‐specific verb frequently used by native Russian speakers, violations of appropriateness of sociolinguistic register, and a significantly lower proportion of emotion word tokens.