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Article published In:
Review of Cognitive Linguistics
Vol. 16:2 (2018) ► pp.455–493

Reconstructing social emotions across languages and cultures

A multifactorial account of the adjectival profiling of shame in English, French, and Polish

 | Adam Mickiewicz University
The present study investigates the adjectival profiling of shame from a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective. This concept, overarching the field of negative self-evaluative emotions, is operationalized through two lexical categories (‘shame’ and ‘embarrassment’) that are comparable in the languages under investigation. The usage of the adjectival exponents of these categories is analyzed in four communities of British English, American English, French, and Polish. The study has two goals, one descriptive, the other methodological. Firstly, it aims to identify the conceptual structuring of the two lexical categories relative to their respective socio-cultural contexts. The result will be four sets of culture-sensitive usage profiles. Secondly, the study further advances corpus-driven quantitative methodology for the description of intersubjectively-grounded abstract concepts. The results obtained here provide partial evidence for the existence of a cultural continuum ranging from the Anglo-Saxon communities, through France to Poland along the descriptive dimension of individualism-collectivism.
Keywords: contrastive linguistics, cultural studies, negative social emotions, usage-based approach, multivariate statistics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Negative social emotions
    • 2.1Shame and embarrassment: Prior research in psychology and linguistics
      • 2.1.1Shame and embarrassment as emotional reactions: Psychological perspectives
      • 2.1.2‘Shame’ and ‘embarrassment’ as lexical categories: Linguistic perspectives
    • 2.2Negative social emotions vis-à-vis collectivistic and individualistic values
  • 3.Hypotheses
  • 4.Methodology
  • 5.Data and analysis
  • 6.Results
    • 6.1Exploratory results: Identifying usage patterns within the sample
    • 6.2Confirmatory results: Predicting speaker behavior beyond the sample
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 5 November 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.00018.kra
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