The Ethnopragmatic Representation of Positive and Negative Emotions in Irish Immigrants’ Letters

Abstract

This chapter explores the ethnopragmatic conceptualization of happiness and sadness in the language of the Irish citizens who immigrated to North America between 1811 and 1880, on the basis of a corpus of Irish emigrants’ personal correspondence. In particular, this study proposes a Natural Semantic Metalanguage examination of the emotional load of the positive adjectives happy and glad, and their negative counterparts, unhappy and sad, in order to elucidate Irish emigrants’ psychological states of mind and emotional responses to transatlantic migrations and life abroad.