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Language Awareness and Emotion

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Language Awareness and Multilingualism

Part of the book series: Encyclopedia of Language and Education ((ELE))

Abstract

This review addresses classic and new approaches to the relationships between emotion and language in multilingual contexts. I first discuss prevalent ideologies that treat emotion as biological and individual, and language as only referential. I then discuss a more fully semiotic view of the relationship between language and emotion that can productively inform examinations of the relationship between multilingualism and emotion. Multilingual displays, interpretations, and experiences of emotion have been studied at three analytic levels: interactions, communities, and individuals. Emotion does not only reside in individual psychobiology but also in semiotically (verbally and nonverbally) mediated social interactions. Emotion can then be treated as simultaneously embodied, social, and semiotically mediated.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I use will use emotion and affect interchangeably, following Wilce (2009).

  2. 2.

    See Gal 2005 for analysis of discursive and cultural constructions of the private/public distinction.

  3. 3.

    This contrasts with Pavlenko (2008) who argues for the existence of a domain of emotion-laden words.

  4. 4.

    Pavlenko (2008) discusses other dimensions of individual bilingualism and emotion, to include bilinguals’ lexical resources for talking about emotion, and less referentially explicit “emotion-laden” forms, such as interjections.

  5. 5.

    One can triangulate such reports with other methods, such as asking other bilinguals to react to and discuss recorded storytellers’ affective displays (Koven 2007). Bilingual listeners found recorded bilingual speakers sounded like different types of people in French versus Portuguese, whom they imaginatively situated in French and Portuguese sociocultural landscapes.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Communication, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA

    Michele Koven

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  1. Michele Koven
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Correspondence to Michele Koven .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept Res Methods Education, University of the Basque Country Dept Res Methods Education, Donostia-San Sebastian, Spain

    Jasone Cenoz

  2. UPV/EHU - IKERBASCQUE, University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU - IKERBASCQUE, Donostia-San Sebastian, Spain

    Durk Gorter

  3. Faculty of Education, University of Auckland, School of Critic, Auckland, New Zealand

    Stephen May

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Koven, M. (2016). Language Awareness and Emotion. In: Cenoz, J., Gorter, D., May, S. (eds) Language Awareness and Multilingualism. Encyclopedia of Language and Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02325-0_5-2

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  1. Latest

    Language Awareness and Emotion
    Published:
    27 December 2016

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02325-0_5-2

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    Language Awareness and Emotion
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    19 July 2016

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02325-0_5-1

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