Abstract
The psycholinguistic research reported in this paper posits a chaining of cognitive phases typical of any surprise episode and the inter-relatedness of emotional and rationalizing linguistic features. An experimental approach has been used to explore the reasons why the presentation of aesthetic visual ‘sources’- a series of works of art- can trigger surprise reactions, hence the title: Surprised? Why? Although surprise is spontaneously expressed and described in fragmented, disorganized, apparently haphazard verbal forms, we have attempted to reconstruct the cognitive scripts underlying the discourse of surprise, by focusing on linguistic manifestations of disconnection, emotional response and adjustment, as three main phases of the cognitive schema of surprise. This work-in-progress is based on 25 recordings and transcripts of spontaneous reactions and emotive self-reports by French and English monolinguals, bilinguals and advanced learners of English. It is part of a larger corpus under completion at University Paris-Diderot, France, within the framework of Surprise, a Vector for Enlarged Cognition, an interdisciplinary project funded by the Research National Agency (French ANR). The study aims at uncovering invariant and variable psycholinguistic features in the surprise discourse of native and non-native speakers of English and French.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The word ‘source’ (Plantin 2011) rather than ‘stimulus’ will be used to prevent a behaviorist interpretation of the phenomenon of surprise.
- 2.
Cf. the technique of the elicitation interview was developed by Pierre Vermersch (1994), and is currently used by phenomenologist Natalie Depraz (this volume).
- 3.
Surprise an Emotion? A colloquium organized by A. Steinbeck and N. Depraz, September 25-27, 2013, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois, USA.
- 4.
‘Valence’ (in its psychological sense) has been chosen over ‘polarity’ as it refers to a scale of positive, negative and neutral traits.
- 5.
“Mirativity refers to the linguistic marking of an utterance as conveying information that is new or unexpected to the speaker” (Delancey 2001: 369–370). In this seminal article, Delancey reviewed a number of languages featuring specific markers of surprise.
- 6.
The specific discourse of foreign language learners and bilinguals regarding the expression of surprise is part of another work in progress to inform research on Second Language acquisition. Linguistic proficiency as a dependent variable (Dewaele 2010) is expected to play a major part.
- 7.
Two different series were alternated to prevent the subjects, who had signed a confidentiality agreement, from communicating on the contents. They were told that the experiment was about language and cognition but not that it revolved around the expression of surprise.
- 8.
72 subjects have participated in the experiment so far (2018), i.e. 12 native speakers of English, 10 native speakers of French, 12 French–English bilinguals and 38 advanced learners of English. The aim is to elicit core universals common to all speakers as well as cognitive and linguistic variations depending on the language spoken and the native, non-native or bilingual status of the speakers.
- 9.
“Surprise-eliciting events initiate a series of mental processes that begin with the appraisal of a cognized event as exceeding some threshold value of unexpectedness or schema-discrepancy, continue with the interruption of ongoing information and, simultaneously, the interruption of ongoing information processing and the reallocation of processing resources to investigation of the unexpected event, and culminate in the analysis and evaluation of this event plus […] immediate reactions to the event and/or the updating, or revision of the schemas that gave rise to the dis-comfirmed expectation”(Reisenzein 2000).
- 10.
The two parts of the experiment are respectively identified as ‘reaction’ part and ‘interview’ part. In the quotations, periods are used to encode silent pauses (one period roughly corresponds to one second, two to two seconds, etc.). Translations in English have been provided in italics whenever the original quotation was in French, and the examples in English are in italics as well.
- 11.
Meret Oppenheim, Fur Breakfast, 1936.
- 12.
Gustav Klimt, Danae et la pluie d’or, 1907–1908.
- 13.
Joachim Beuckelaer, Slaughtered Pig, 1563.
- 14.
The initial directive to the students starts this way: ‘you’re going to see a series of works of art …’.
- 15.
Lucian Freud’s Naked Man, 1992.
- 16.
Ken Kiff, Green Man, 1977.
- 17.
Gustave Doré, Vision of Paradise, 1861.
- 18.
Joachim Beuckelaer, Slaughtered Pig, 1563.
- 19.
This student spent several years in various English-speaking countries and qualifies as a late bilingual.
- 20.
Louise Bourgeois, Janus Fleuri, 1968.
- 21.
n x refers to the number of tokens of the same word form, in English or in French.
- 22.
Paul Ribeyrolle, Implosion, 1994.
- 23.
The variable interactions at play between the semantic properties of the aesthetic source and the individual history of a speaker may explain the variety of the subjects’ appraisal reactions (work in progress).
- 24.
Chaïm Soutine, Carcass of Beef, 1925.
- 25.
Descartes, Traité des Passions, article 70: l’admiration est “une subite surprise de l’âme, qui fait qu’elle se porte à considérer avec attention les objets qui lui semblent rares ou extraordinaire.”
- 26.
One subject reported being negatively disturbed by the dominant color (she didn’t like yellow) and the religious connotations (as a result of her own family history).
- 27.
Jeff Lyons, Illu, 1996.
- 28.
This may also be partly due to the aesthetic nature of the sources, which tends to cause more affective reactions.
- 29.
Louise Bourgeois, Spider (1996).
References
Altarriba, Jeanette. 2006. Cognitive approaches to the study of emotion-laden and emotion words in monolingual and bilingual memory. In Pavlenko, A. (Ed.). Bilingual minds, emotional experience, expression and representation. Clevedon. England. Multilingual Matters: 232–256.
Bublatzky, Florian, Pedro Guerra, Carmen Pastor, Harald Schupp, and Jaime Vila. 2013. Additive effects of threat-of-shock and picture valence on startle reflex modulation. PLOS ONE 8 (1): 1–6 www.plosone.org, Last accessed Sept 2014.
Caffi, Claudia, and Richard Janney, eds. 1994. Involvement in language. Special Issue of Journal of Pragmatics 22: 325–373.
Cosnier, Jacques. 2006. Psychologie des Émotions et des Sentiments. Paris. France. Retz.
Damasio, Antonio. 1994. Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain. New York: Grosset/Putnam Book.
Delancey, Scott. 2001. The mirative and evidentiality. Journal of Pragmatics 33: 369–382.
Dewaele, Jean-Marc. 2010. Emotions in multiple languages. London: Palgrave MacMillan.
Ekman, Paul. 1992. Are there basic emotions? Psychology Review 99: 150–153.
Goossens, Vannina. 2005. Les noms de sentiments, esquisse de typologie sémantique fondée sur les collocations verbales. LIDIL 32: 103–121.
Johnson-Laird, Peter, and Keith Oatley. 1989. The language of emotions: An analysis of a semantic field. Cognition and Emotion 3 (2): 81–123.
Kövecses, Zoltán. 2000. Metaphor and emotion, language, culture and body in human feeling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lang, Peter, Margaret Bradley, and Bruce Cuthbert. 1990. Emotion, attention, and the startle reflex. Psychological Review 97 (3): 377–395.
Meyer, Wulf-Uwe, Rainer Reisenzein, and Achim Schützwohl. 1997. Toward a process analysis of emotions: The case of surprise. Motivation and Emotion 21 (3): 251–274.
Novakova, Iva, Vannina Goossens, and Elena Melnikova. 2012. « Associations sémantiques et lexicales spécifiques: sur l’exemple du lexique émotionnel des champs de surprise et de déception », Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française SHS Web of Conferences, 1020–1021. http://www.shs-conferences.org/articles/shsconf/abs/2012/01/shsconf_cmlf12_000181/shsconf_cmlf12_000181.html. Last accessed on Sept 2014.
Ortony, Andrew, Gerald Clore, and Mark Foss. 1987. The referential structure of the affective lexicon. Cognitive Science 11: 341–364.
Ortony, Andrew, Gerald Clore, and Allan Collins. 1988. The Cognitive Structure of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pavlenko, Aneta. 2006. Bilingual selves. In Bilingual minds, emotional experience, expression and representation, ed. A. Pavlenko, 1–33. Clevedon, Multilingual Matters.
———. 2008. Emotion and emotion-laden words in the bilingual lexicon. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 11 (2): 147–164.
Plantin, Christian. 2011. Les Bonnes raisons des émotions: Principes et méthode pour l’étude du discours émotionné. Berne: Peter Lang.
Plutchik, Robert. 1980. Emotion: A psychoevolutionary synthesis. NewYork: Longman Higher Education.
Reisenzein, Rainer. 2000. The subjective experience of surprise. In The message within: The role of subjective experience in social cognition and behavior, ed. H. Bless and P. Forgas, 262–279. Philadelphia: Psychology Press.
Stein, Nancy, and Marc Hernandez. 2007. Assessing understanding and appraisals during emotional experience. In Handbook of emotion elicitation and assessment, ed. A. Coan and J. Allen, 298–317. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Syssau, Arielle. 2006. Emotion et Cognition. In Emotion et Cognition: Quand l’émotion parle à la cognition, ed. N. Blanc et al., 13–67. Paris, Ed. In Press.
Valetopoulos, Freiderikos. 2013. Traduire la peur et la surprise: une étude contrastive en Grec moderne et en Français. In Des Sentiments au point de vue, ed. A. Chuquet, N. Raluca, and F. Valetopoulos, 95–116. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes.
Vermersch, Pierre. 1994. L’Entretien d’explicitation en formation continue et initiale. Paris: ESF.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Appendix
Appendix
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Goutéraux, P. (2018). Surprised? Why? The Expression of Surprise in French and in English: An Experimental Approach. In: Depraz, N., Steinbock, A. (eds) Surprise: An Emotion?. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 97. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98657-9_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98657-9_10
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-98656-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-98657-9
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)