Publications
Publication details [#59253]
Ponsonnet, Maïa. 2014. The Language of Emotions. The case of Dalabon (Australia). (Cognitive Linguistic Studies in Cultural Contexts 4). John Benjamins.
Publication type
Book – monograph
Publication language
English
Keywords
Language as a subject
Annotation
This book is the first extensive study of the linguistic encoding of emotions in an Australian language, and further, in an endangered, non-European language. Based on first-hand data collected using innovative methods, the monograph describes and analyzes how Dalabon speakers express emotions (using interjections, prosody, evaluative morphology) and the words they use to describe and discuss emotions. Like many languages, Dalabon makes broad use of body-part words in descriptions of emotions. The volume analyzes the figurative functions of these body-part words, as well as their non-figurative functions. Correlations between linguistic features and cultural patterns are systematically questioned.