Patterns of allocentric emotional expressions, a contrastive study
Résumé
The aim of this paper is to analyze, from a contrastive point of view, a pattern of allocentric emotional expressions (AEE), X emotion term Y, where “” stands for the preposition “for” and its equivalents in French, Romanian and Russian, ex. I am happy for you. AEE constructions allow the speaker to express his/her emotional experience and represent it as being provoked by the situation of the Other; the speaker is said to be affected by this situation. Although a “surface” reading of these constructions suggests that the Other is substituted for by the Self, it is mainly an emotional experience WITH the Other (empathy) that is expressed. The emotion terms selected for the study belong to the domains of fear, joy, sadness and shame, and are all able to fit into the AEE pattern.
The AEE pattern questions the subjective nature of the emotional expression, inasmuch as its empathic reading points out strategies of intersubjectification. I argue that sharing emotions, although probably not any type of emotion is a commonplace practice, in line with a broader semantic and pragmatic scope: construction and interpretation of meaning. I hypothesize that the AEE constructions develop, on top of the semantic meaning of the emotional terms involved, more general meanings, like concern and compassion; they also develop pragmatic and discursive functions, like criticism, disapproval, etc. and reveal various communicative strategies.
Domaines
Linguistique
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