Emotions as inseparable part of our life

While thinking about the interaction between language and emotion, one automatically
thinks about descriptive emotion words. This review shows that emotions can be
connected with language and easily interact with it at many levels of structure, from the
sound patterns of a language to its lexicon and grammar, and beyond to how it appears in
conversation and discourse. This analyze shows that emotion is, actually, appropriate for
every scope of language—from phonology to lexicon, as well as grammar and discourse
—emotional expression is finely appeared to be language-specific structures. There are a
number of issues connected with the interaction between emotion and language, each of
which could appear at different levels of structure, as suggested by Wilce (2009: 3), who
noted: “nearly every dimension of every language at least potentially encodes emotion.”
How do in cultural appears shapes of the language of emotion? Does language has an
impact on cognition and culture? These central questions are not answered in this review,
but I mark them to show the critical role of language in emotion research. Based on
current emotion investigate in the language sciences, one could ask whether there are
generalizations to be made about what types of emotional meaning appear where. Is it the
case, for instance, that while phonology conducts information about affect, lexicon
conveys discrete emotion and grammar expresses attitude? This division is too
elementary. Hearers turned to decode discrete emotions from prosody; words show
connotative meaning, also descriptive meanings and attitude can be appeared by the
smaller units than the sentence. Still, we may note that some linguistic structures are
easier for conveying some aspects of emotion. Future emotion research ought to continue
to operate cross-linguistic differences to study this issue, and to explain additional
principles examining language and emotion. Every person has its
own way and unique style of communication and perceiving messages in their everyday
life. For communication every language provides speakers with an array of verbal and
non-verbal strategies for conveying emotions. In concert with nоnverbal forms of
communication, verbal communication becomes as a primary tool to share emotions
among people. It is performed as a mean for expressing desires, ideas and concepts,
referring to the use of sounds and language to convey a massage. It can be easily seen
that we always express some kind of emotion or feeling. Our emotions depend in
function of what happens to us at the given moment or even what has happened during a
day, week, in the past. However, we may not always be aware of it, to put it another way,
we may not realize or express clearly which emotion we are experience at a given
moment. Emotions are very complex experiences and, to show them, we need a great
variety of linguistic mechanism, such as emotional patterns. Verbal descriptions of
emotional states can provide accurate information about the specific form of an emotion,
such as anger, depression or happiness that a person is experiencing. Regardless of the
fact that the list of feelings and reactions that are included under the term emotions is
almost infinite, that is why they are classified as positive (well, happy, strong and etc.)
and negative (uncomfortable, sick, sad and etc.). Wukmir (1967) asserts that while using
our language in daily life, emotions are expressed with the help of positive –negative
scale and in different dimension, such as “I am quite well”, “I am well”, “I am very well”
(degrees in the positive axis) or “I am quite bad”, “I am bad”, “I am very bad” (degrees in
the negative axis) (Wukmir 1967: What is Emotion).
Speaking about situations when emotion may be caused, the words such as “love”,
“friendship”, “fear”, “uncertainty”, “respect” are chosen, so we form the description of
emotion. We may say, for instance, “I feel very well understood” (positive) or “I feel a
little deceived” (negative). As a result of it, we can point out in all emotions two well
differentiated components. On the one hand, a qualitative components that is expressed
by the way the word is used to describe emotions (love, friendship, fear, insecurity and
etc.) determining the positive or negative aspects of the emotional sign. On the other
hand, we may conclude that all emotions possess a quantitative component that may be
expressed by means of words of magnitude (little, quite, enough, a lot, great, some, much
and etc.) (Wukmir 1967: What is Emotion).
It is well known that the language that we use in our everyday life which is called
spoken language is not a ready –made or artificial created unit. This spoken language is
created spontaneously so that to some degree it reflects our emotional world. In everyday
communication speakers not only exchange their ideas, information but also convey vie
language means their feelings and emotions. The relevance of emotions for language and
linguistics is considered from three perspectives: the conceptualization of emotions,
expression of emotions and the grounding of language. As to the conceptualization
perspective, study on the emotional lexicon is discussed. Not only content words, but also
prepositions are used (to long for, hate against). From the expression perspective, it is
affirmed that the expression of emotions can be found on all linguistic levels:
phonological, morphological, lexical, syntactic, and on the level of figurative language
use (metaphor and metonymy). “Grounding” of language in emotion means that emotion
is one of the preconditions for the functioning of language. Emotion is part of the
embodied grounding (Moving Ourselves, Moving Others: Motion and emotion in
intersubjectivity, consciousness and language2012: 347–368).
The concept of embodied cognition and grounding of language and emotion has
dominated the literature in the field of cognitive science since the introduction of the
concept in the early 19th century, even though the connection between language and
physics manifestation of emotional states was also observed by Freud. Since emotion and
language are grounded in our bodies and brain, it is of logical consequence that a field
such as the linguistic expression of metaphor would attract a great amount of interest due
to relative of concepts provided between emotions and literal references (William James
1984).
Edward Murray in his work “The arousal of Emotion” maintains that emotions are
caused by a variety of innate stimulus patterns, learned stimuli and social situations.
Firstly, he points out innate emotional arousal. For example, the emotion of fear can be
aroused in an animal, a child or an adult by nearly any sudden and intense stimulus
innately. Secondly, he speaks about that fact that humans and animals may be afraid of
many more things. Murray asserts that this phenomenon is known in psychology as
already learned emotional arousal. According to him another important factor in the
arousal of emotion is one’s personal threat. In this case emotional arousal depends on
some sorts of personal evaluation of the threat, on a threat to something of personal
importance (Edward Murray 1969:51-56).
We have revealed that the problem of emotion involves a number of important
issues: perception, processing and evaluation of emotions and emotional states, verbal
and non –verbal means of expressing emotion. The way of expressing verbal emotion is
very important not to be misunderstood as expressing them we use great variety of words
and word combinations.
In everyday communication all of us, to some extent, make use of different
relevant parameters in order to make our speech more expressive: pitch, amplitude, voice
quality, pause and etc. Prosody is the main constitutive due to emphatic speech-style. It
may represent various features of the speaker or the utterance: the emotional state of the
speaker, the form of the utterance (statement, question or command), the presence of
irony or sarcasm, emphasis, contrast, and focus, or other elements of language that may
not be encoded by grammar or by choice of vocabulary.

Emotions Expressed With Vocal Attitudes

According to Robert M. Krauss, professor of psychology at Columbia University, signs

and symbols are the major signals that make up verbal communication. Words act as
symbols, and signs are secondary products of the underlying message and include things
like tone of voice, blushing and facial expressions (Robert Krauss, The Psychology of
Verbal Communication: 1996).
Intonation is used for a range of functions such as indicating the attitudes and
emotions of the speaker. It is the way that the sender’s pitch of voice rises and falls when
speaking. It shows whether the speaker expresses his or her massage in the form of a
question or statement. In the first case, the voice rises at the end of the phrase or the
sentence and in the second case, it falls. At the same time, intonation indicates the end of
an entity of information, which in written communication is shown by means of comma,
semicolon, point, exclamation mark or question mark. Laying emphasis on a particular
word or idea and detailing that the interpreter must not fail to be aware of another
function of intonation .
Tone of voice is a way by which the speaker intends to show the attitude of the
message. It is also a way when the speaker inquires some kind of reaction from the
hearer. We may bring a bright example of political debate where the tone of voice should
be rousing, while on television the daily news is communicated in a disappointed,
monotonous, friendly, enthusiastic, vivid, and persuasive and etc.
Pause can be divided into two different functions. 1. It can be a brief suspension
of the voice to find out the limits and connection of sentences and their parts. A pause
then assumes a similar function in oral discourse to intonation. 2. It can embody a
temporary vocal inactivity to display the speaker’s uncertainty, hesitation, irresolution or
uneasiness. From the context, it may be seen that a pause can also be judgmental by
revealing agreement or disagreement. It can have a positive or negative influence on the
process of communication.
Language owes its origin to the imitation and modification, aided by signs and
gestures, of varies natural Sounds, the voices of other animals, and men’s own distinctive
cries. It is vivid from a known analogy that this power would have been especially caused
during the courtship of the success, serving to express varies emotions, as love, jealousy,
triumph, and serving as a challenge to their rivals. The imitation by articulate sounds of
musical cries might have given rise to words expressive of varies complex emotions.
Darwin in this quote speak about close relationship between emotion and the sound in
evolutionary terms, the sentiment echoed by scholars over the years (Cf. Christianson and
Kirby, 2003). Regardless of whether emotionally expression was the original impelling
force for a language evolution or not, we can never nevertheless ask of the 6.000 or so
languages spoken today: is there evidence for a continuing tight link between speech
sounds and emotions? To found out the answers to all these questions it is important to
know the difference of aspects of speech sounds. There are the physical parameters which
show sound’s aquatic properties: how sound is related with physiology and it is perceived
auditory. Sounds alter in loudness, pitch, duration, length, voice quality and so on.
Moreover, there are the sounds like consonants and vowels, which combine to make
meaningful units, such as words, within a language. For any one of these speech sounds
parameters we could ask whether they are used to signal emotion.
Prosody refers to “the structure that organizes sounds”, which is a quality of
speech including pitch, tempo, loudness and so on (Cutler, Dahan and Van Donselaar,
1997:142). With the help of the high pitch of the voice, long vowels and voices’ level, the
emotional intensity and particular emotions maybe indicated. Voice qualities, like harsh,
tense, breathy or whisper, can likewise reflect emotional state (Gobl and Ni Chasaide,
2003). In Zapotec, a language spoken Mexico, speakers, with the help of different
phonation types, mark different speech registers: speaking with a high pitch falsetto
shows respect; using a breathy voice indicates authority; while a creaky voice seeks
commiseration (Sicoli 2010). Here, sound features points on social roles. Though it has
been offered that speaking louder, at high pitch and so forth, usher in greater depth of
feeling. In everyday conversation there are complex cues and dynamics at play, making it
unlikely that loudness, for example, always signals greater intensity. Experimental
evidence suggests that speakers can organize discrete emotions from paralinguistic
features across spoken languages. For example, Pell Monetta, Paumann and Kotz (2009)
played Spanish, English, German and Arabic recordings of “pseudo-utterances” (i.e.,
utterances without semantic content) to Spanish participants who supposed to decide
which emotion was reflected: anger, disgust, fear, sadness, joy or neutral. Recognition
rates by Spanish speakers were signification above chance for all four languages. This
study, and the other cited earlier, is suggestive of cross-cultural recognition of specific
emotions; but many of these articles match languages that have some kind of a relation
with each other (typically Indo-European languages) or share other linguistic
characteristics (for example, English and Chinese both have subject verb object word
order and are morphologically more analytic (Comrie 1981)). These shared
characteristics urge caution in the face of the claims such as “vocal expressions of the
emotions investigated contain invariant or “modal” elements which are universally
exploited by speakers and can be decoded across languages irrespective of the linguistic
ability and experience of the listener” (Pell, Monetta, Paulmann and Kotz 2009:116). It is
important to consider the pertinent cross-linguistic facts. The same paralinguistic features
can play different roles across languages. Take pitch, for instance: In English pitch is
implicated in word stress and thus can help disambiguate nouns from verbs (e.g., PERmit
vs. perMIT), while lexical-tone languages use pitch to distinguish between words.
Indeed, when expressing emotion, pitch is less important in Chinese, a lexical tone
language, and instead speech rate is more relevant (Anolli, 434 Emotion Review Vol. 4
No.4 Wang, Mantovani and De Toni, 2008). Pitch can also mark phrase boundaries, yes-
no question and language-specific functions of pitch in order to change them the
emotion-relevant ones. This makes time to figure out (Friend 2000; Quam and Swingley
2012). One other pertinent detail relating to the aforementioned studies on emotion and
prosody is that they typically use order or posed materials. Future research will have to
bridge the gap between how speakers use emotions in everyday settings. Finally, it is
deplorable that many studies in this area do not form the language background of their
participants; bilingualism is potentially a serious issue for interpreting results.
Within literary studies many scholars have likewise noted correspondences
between sounds and emotion. Fónagy (1961), for example, compared aggressive and
tender poems by the Hungarian poet Petöfi and found that /t/, /k/ and /r/ were more
frequent in aggressive poems, while /l/, /m/ and /n/ were more frequent in tender poems.
Masson(1953), when considering various European poets, argues that /o/, /l/, /m/ and /w/
suggest liquidity, softness and coolness. Likewise, Tsur (1992) suggests /l/ is liquid,
periodic and soothing. In the last decade or more, there have been attempts to test these
positive associations statistically. For example, Whissell (1999) transcribed poetry, song
lyrics, advertisements and various types of popular fiction into phonemic transcript and
then tested whether certain category of phonemes appear more often in particular genres.
Independently, she calculated the emotional tone of each text by averaging the
pleasantness and activation scores of words that also appear in the “Dictionary of Affect
in Language” (Whissell 1989). Using this procedure, Whissell found a number of
associations between categories of phonemes (e.g., bilabial consonant /m/, /p/, /b/) and
emotion (e.g., aggressiveness), through the higher than chance appearance of those
phonemes in certain genres (e.g., Zeppelin Lyrics, boy’s advertisements). Using a similar
approach, Whissell (2003) found that text with more /i/ phonemes tend to more pleasant,
while those with /I/ phonemes were more active. More recently, Auracher, Albers, Zhai,
Gareeva and Stavniychuk (2010) tested the cross-cultural validity of these emotional
sound-symbolic associations. Auracher et al. selected a number of poems from German,
Russian, Ukrainian and Chinese and calculated the ratio of plosives (/p/) to nasal (/n/) in
each poem. They then selected the poem with the highest and lowest rations in each
language and asked native speakers to rate those poems on a number of parameters,
including happiness, arousal, aggression, and melancholy. Across languages, they found
an association between consonant and emotionality which they state “clearly suggests
there is a universal tendency to express happy and active feelings with plosive sounds,
whereas sad and passive feelings are encoded in nasal sounds” (Auracher et al., 2010:21).
Majid Emotion in the language Sciences 425 in an independent line of inquiry, Zajonc
and colleagues (McIntos, Zajonc, Vig and Emerick 1997; Zajonc, Murphy and Inglehart
1989) argue that facial feedback whilst producing vowels causes distinct emotion states.
They focus, in particular, on the German vowel /ü/, /y/, which they claim “constrict the
nostrils and pushes the mouth and brows forward, as in scowl” (McIntosh et al.
1997:177). In a number of studies, Zajonc and colleagues tested Americans and Germans
for pleasantness and mood after uttering the vowel itself or when embedded multiple
times within a story. In line with their prediction, they found that participants had lower
pleasantness and mood ratings when they produced ü than any other vowels. All in all,
these studies come to the same conclusion: there are robust sound-emotion
correspondences, which are likely universal. However, there may be found a number of
problematic points that hold across these studies. In general, when we compare texts to
find some kind of associations between sounds and emotions they differ on a number of
parameters, aside from the test phoneme, including length, rhyme, frequency of non-
critical phonemes and so forth. These confounding elements make it difficult to interpret
the results unambiguously. In addition, the studies do not take into consideration the fact
that words do not appear independently of each other; rather, when discussing a certain
topic, keywords are likely to reappear, thus inflating calculation of the frequency of
letters/phonemes and their likely association with emotions. Where statistical tests have
been ordered, they are numerous with no correction for multiple comparisons. Zajonc et
al.’s studies are exemplary in experimental control, but the underlying premise of these
studies is highly dubious. It is claimed the same muscles involved in the production of
/y/, such as the corrugation muscle, are also implicated in negative emotions. However,
the only reason articulation of /y/ would involve frowning is if participants found it
difficult to produce, which is quite plausible since the participant in these studies were
either English monolinguals or English-German bilinguals. English does not have a
phoneme /y/ and English speakers find it notoriously hard to produce. For native
monolingual Germans, /y/ does not involve the corrugate muscle, nor does it entail
constriction of the nostrils (Von Essen 1979). There has been no test of the greater
negativity of ü with native monolingual speakers of German, so we do not know whether
the posited-emotion association exists.