Emotions across Languages and Cultures: Diversity and Universals (review)

This book is about emotions that are shaped and communicated by human language, more precisely, by meanings in language. The discussions take full advantage of Wierzbicka’s now well-known theory of natural semantic metalanguage which is also explained at length in Ch. 1. In many respects this opening chapter also serves as a good introduction to the best of W’s contribution to semantics during the last 30 years of indefatigable research. The theory provides a cognitive framework for a reductive paraphrase of linguistic concepts given through a limited number of basic semantic categories consisting of 60 lexical universals.

In Ch. 2 the author identifies the cognitive components of the ‘emotional universes’ encoded in English words such as joy, frustration, sadness, fear, envy, and shame. This is followed by an in-depth analysis of the German concept of ‘Angst’ in Ch. 3 in order to show how the approach can be useful for the analysis of specific linguistic and cultural phenomena. Here W explains that the idea of Angst is in fact a cultural creation based on history, religion, and way of life. She also shows that much of it goes back to Martin Luther.

The next two chapters discuss the physical manifestations of emotions in relation to their linguistic encoding. Ch. 4 presents a typology of human facial expressions. Eight basic meaningful facial expressions constitute the semantics of the human face; each can be linguistically and empirically described: eyebrows drawn together, eyebows raised, eyes wide open, mouth corners raised, mouth corners lowered, mouth open, lips pressed together, and nose wrinkled. These facial expressions acquire their meanings thanks to the universal encoding of human emotions in language. Hence the first of these, eyebrows drawn together, universally means ‘I want to do something, but I know that I am not going to do it now’. Ch. 5 contains a detailed analysis of gestures expressing emotions as found in Russian together with brief contrastive observations about their counterparts in English. Even if many of the insights here are accessible only to those who are at home with both Russian and English, this chapter clearly shows how the repertoire of gestures and their meanings is generally bound to the way particular languages encode emotions.

The rest of the book deals with further general perspectives of analysis. Ch. 6 sums up the author’s ‘cultural script’ theory which has proved useful for the study of emotions from a cross-cultural perspective. Polish, for example, operates on three elements, i.e., sincerity, warmth, and spontaneity as opposed to tact, considerateness, and kindness of Anglo- American culture. In Ch. 7 the author gives some final observations about emotional universals found in the languages of the world.

While several parts of the book have appeared elsewhere in one form or another, this volume nevertheless represents the state of the art of the interdisciplinary approach to semantics that the author has almost single-handedly cultivated in the last 30 years with great success.