Emotions and expressive emotiveness

in multiple languages

May 31/June, 2024

Sharing Emotions, why is it so important?

For maintaining physical and mental health (Averill, 1982)

Can you
name some
emotions?
 How do communicating emotions change for
monolinguals and multilinguals?
• Monolinguals → Organizing various
feelings such as happiness, and sadness
in one single language (Javier, 2007)

• Multilinguals → Using several available

linguistic resources to express emotions
• constructing a unique, hybrid
cultural, national and ethnic identity
• “knowledge of two or more
languages in one mind” (Cook, 2003,
p. 2)
4 different approaches to Emotion and
Expressive Emotiveness
• The neurobiological perspective
• The neurobiological systems that mediate the basic emotions such as fear and joy (e.g., Panksepp, 2000)
• how subcortical areas of the brain coordinate the behavioural, physiological and psychological processes
• A cognitive linguistic approach
• “Emotions are both feelings and cognitive constructions, linking person, action,
and sociological milieu.” (Rosaldo, 1984, p. 304).
• Cultural psychological approaches
• Emotional expression → a public instrumental action that may or may not be related
directly to the inner feelings (Markus & Kitayama, 1991, p. 236)
• E.g. Showing anger in European and Japanese cultures, independent and interdependent selves

• A social constructivist approach

• Emotion as socially constructed subsystems of behaviors including an individual’s appraisal of the situation and
which are interpreted as passions rather than as actions”
The emic-etic distinction in SLA and
multilingualism research
• Etic analyses
• Outsider research perspective
• Comparative research across languages, situations and cultures
• Emic analyses
• Insider (participant-relevant) perspective
• Conversation Analysis (CA) → An inductive search for patterns of interaction
in episodes of naturally occurring interactions
• Employing language to access a participant’s emotional state (Ogarkova et al.,
2009)
• “a carefully done emic analysis precedes and forms the basis for etic extensions that
allow for cross-cultural or cross-setting comparisons” (Watson-Gegeo, 1988, pp.
581–582)
• Mixed method research design → rich, good-quality data
 https://mediazioni.unibo.it/article/view/15263

• to investigate how interactants express and

manage their emotions through swearwords

• 10.5 hours of video recordings collected in

Institutional (business meeting) and ordinary
(dinner party) settings in Milano, Italy

Findings of the Study

Adesso m’incazzo/“now I’m getting pissed”)

to show anger
Showing Anger in Call-Center Interaction:
“benim canımı sıkmayın”
(Bozbıyık, Efeoğlu-Özcan, Işık-Güler, msc in prep)

how the caller attacks to the professional

face of the call-center operator through
verbal statements of impoliteness and
showing anger

Request for Solution

Overlapping, Interruption
Verbal Aggresion (Threat)
Imperative Sentences

Directing to another operator

Holding the line
More Emotional Language in Classroom Interaction
Molecular pharmacology course
at master level

Using Spanish metaphorical expression

through embodied Actions

Using more emotional and vivid language

within translingual turns to bring the
academic content closer to the students

Translingual turns for communicating emotions

(Bozbıyık & Morton, 2024)

 (Dewaele, 2010)
• large-scale investigation on how multilinguals feel
about their languages and use them to communicate
emotion; 1600 multilinguals participated in the
research; quantitative and qualitative approaches used
• (?) factors that affect multilinguals' self-perceived
competence, attitudes, communicative anxiety,
language choice and code-switching when expressing
feelings, anger and when swearing.
• Results: how and when a language was learnt
determines future use and communicative anxiety.
Aspects such as present use of the language, the total
number of languages known, and the level of emotional
intelligence also play an important role.
 (Dewaele, 2010)
• The Bilingualism and Emotions
Questionnaire (BEQ) (Dewaele & Pavlenko,
2001–2003)
• 3 different parts of the questionnaire
• 1st part: 13 questions for demographic
information such as gender, age, education level,
and ethnic group
• 2nd part: Likert-type questions including code-
switching behaviour in inner and articulated
speech, on language choice for expressing
feelings in general, and more specifically anger;
on the use and perception of swear-words; on
attitudes toward the different languages and,
finally, on communicative and foreign language
anxiety in the different languages
• 3rd part: 9 open-ended questions such as their
linguistic preferences for emotion terms and
terms of endearment and the preferred language
to recall bad or difficult memories
Lets take a look
at some of the
questions:
(Dewaele, 2010) findings:
• How can use of emotional expressions change for language users and language
learners? (the effect of context of acquisition-instructed/natural/mixed)
• Learning a language through formal classroom instruction → less frequently
communicating emotions rather than naturalistic language learning and/or
practicing a language outside the classroom

• What is your preferred language for emotional expression?

• When you socialize more in a language, it can be the most emotional
language
• Changing in terms of various factors (e.g., new language, partner, and
culture)
• Networks of interlocutors

• How long does it take for you to learn swearwords in English?

• cultural background in the perception and use of emotional language
(Dewaele, 2010)
• How does knowing more languages influence anxiety to use emotional
expressions?
• The more languages you know, the more competent you feel to communicate
emotions.

• How do multilingual speakers use speech acts in more diversified ways?

• Having dynamic capacity to use emotional expressions
• Using their multi-competence to develop multilingual speech acts and
emotion scripts
• Strategic language choices for specific purposes (Complementarity Principle)
(Grosjean, 2001, 2008) (e.g., sacar las tripas-rip your guts out)
RQs he had:
(Dewaele, 2016, p. 118)

online questionnaire from 1159 native

English (L1) users and 1165 English as a
foreign language users (LX)

emotional valence from mildly negative to

extremely negative
(Dewaele, 2016)

LX users
• less sure about the exact meaning of
most words
• more frequent use of relatively less
offensive words
• over-estimate the offensiveness of
most emotion-laden words

L1 users
• Having a life-long exposure to
these words, knowing their
meanings more

Dewaele, 2016, p. 121

LX users found to “overestimate offensiveness” of
negative emotion-laden words:
(Dewaele and Forth, 2003)
(Dewaele, 2010, 2016)
• How have you learnt swearwords and other offensive expressions in
English?

• Televisions and the written press beep out swearwords. Authentic

materials do not include them. How can we teach these words to our
students? Or should we teach?

• What about the reactions of parents and social communities?

If they are a natural part of interaction, should

they not also be a natural part of our curricula?
(Dewaele, 2010, 2016)
• As potential (language) teachers,
how can you enable your students
use more emotional expressions and
emotion laden words in LX?
• combining classroom learning and
authentic interaction
• Role-plays and experiences of authentic
communication
• (e.g., using film extracts) →
https://hotpot.uvic.ca/

Are these materials really authentic?

 Tokyo Global Gateway (TGG)

(Nanbu, & Greer, 2023: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/tesq.3197 ).

https://tokyo-global-gateway.com/
Nanbu, Z., & Greer, T. (2023). Creating Obstacles to
Progressivity: Task Expansion in Second Language
Role‐Plays. TESOL Quarterly, 57(4), 1364-1400.
The multilingual emotion lexicon
• Recent research has shown that
• emotion words (‘‘love’’, ‘‘hate’’, “happy”, “angry”) and
• emotion-laden words (“failed”, marriage”, ‘‘kiss’’, ‘‘rape’’) differ from
both concrete and abstract words in the way they are represented and
processed (see Pavlenko, 2008 for a complete overview).
• The seminal work of Altarriba and Santiago-Rivera (1994) used
the word-priming paradigm to investigate the representation
that bilingual individuals have of emotion words in their two
languages linking it to cross-linguistic differences and language
histories.
How do we know about the Differences
between languages? (Pavlenko, 2008)
• Four types of studies contribute to our
understanding of emotionality of
bilinguals’ languages:
• experimental studies of skin conductance
response (SCR) in bilingual speakers,
• self-reports of bilinguals’ perceptions of their
respective languages,
• clinical case studies of bilinguals in therapy,
• experimental studies of bilingual
autobiographic memory.
Electrodermal activity…

• How about more emic study findings?

What did Dewaele
(2008) find?
SENİ SEVİYORUM

I LOVE YOU

ICH LIEBE DICH

JE T'AIME
• Dewaele’s (2008) quantitative and qualitative data
suggest that multilinguals typically perceive the
phrase I love you as having more emotional weight
in their L1,
• although a quarter of participants perceived it to be so in
the LX only.
• Participants often showed a strong awareness of subtle
differences in emotional weight of I love you in their
different languages.
• Statistical analyses showed that the perception of the phrase
I love you was not affected by sociobiographical variables
such as gender and education nor by trait emotional
intelligence,
• but that it was associated with the L2 learning history and
recent language use of the L2, as well as with the self-
perceived competence in the L2.

• What else can it be affected by?

Harris, C. L., Ayçíçeğí, A.,
& Gleason, J. B. (2003).
Taboo words and
reprimands elicit greater
autonomic reactivity in a
first language than in a
second
language. Applied
Psycholinguistics, 24(4),
561-579.
What
participants
in the study
said:
Işık-Güler (2013): Dil algısı
ve asimetrik güç ilişkisi:
Yabancı dil sınıfında
anadilde ve ikinci dilde
söylenen Uyarı sözcelerinin
eşdeğer(siz)liği

Işık-Güler & Acı (2012):

Teacher delivered
“Silencers” in the EFL
Classroom: the impact of the
use of L1/L2 and
Individual/Group Focus in
influencing Child and Adult
(Im)Politeness Evaluations
for more…
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AWowCJdwkE
Things to remember from FLE 337…on
normalizing bi/multilingualism for the future:
• Understanding the ubiquity of multilingualism
• We have seen that named languages are social constructs; the linguistic reality, on the
other hand, is the coexistence of a huge range of varieties which are not bounded
entities but are in contact with, and influence, each other. They constantly change,
moving closer to (sometimes mixing or merging with) some varieties and distancing
themselves from others.
• Acknowledging the linguistic diversity in the world
• Protecting the world’s linguistic diversity should not be limited to revitalizing the
standard varieties of particular languages which are perceived as being endangered. It
should also involve the recognition of the new linguistic diversity emerging every day in
our quickly changing and globalizing world.
• Building upon the whole of students’ linguistic repertoires
• It is essential for teachers to respect the whole of their students’ linguistic repertoires if
they want to provide them with the best possible chances of educational success.
 We, too, have travelled a long way together
on the road of multilingualism this term…

We have almost reached the end of our journey. We have seen many things
together on the way, potentially learned to think more critically about our
own language ideologies and hopefully gained a deeper understanding of
numerous issues surrounding bi/multilingualism, the individual and society.
It was a real pleasure being with you for half of this
term☺

Any questions?