Conceptualisation of Other-Directed Discontent in Russian, Compared to English and Spanish
[eng] Other-directed emotions, both positive (e.g. love, pity, admiration) and negative (e.g. hatred, anger, disgust), play an important role in communication due to their social nature and involvement of another party. Emotive discourse regulates social encounters and triggers response in participa...
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| Tipo de recurso: | tesis doctoral |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2020 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universidad de Barcelona |
| Repositorio: | Dipòsit Digital de la UB |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:diposit.ub.edu:2445/174960 |
| Acceso en línea: | https://hdl.handle.net/2445/174960 http://hdl.handle.net/10803/671098 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Lingüística Emocions Lexicologia Rus Linguistics Emotions Lexicology Russian language |
| Sumario: | [eng] Other-directed emotions, both positive (e.g. love, pity, admiration) and negative (e.g. hatred, anger, disgust), play an important role in communication due to their social nature and involvement of another party. Emotive discourse regulates social encounters and triggers response in participants of such encounters. When learning a new language, one needs to be able to interpret correctly emotive discourse and, ideally, to articulate adequately one's own emotions. Therefore, it is important to know what emotion concepts exist in a given language and if they differ in any way from the speaker's first language. From the sociolinguistic point of view, other-directed discontent is extremely culture-dependent: there are strict rules of what, how and when can or should be expressed and consequently interpreted by an illocutor and reacted upon. Moreover, according to the Russian National Corpus frequency chart, emotion terms of discontent are the most frequent ones among the other-directed emotions in Russian: obida “offence/resentment” is extremely salient, only surpassed by the lexemes denoting "love", "hope", "happiness", “joy” and "fear". The present study seeks to fill the gap in studies on the conceptualisation of other-directed discontent in Russian, compared to English and Spanish. For this purpose, relevant research papers, lexicographical sources and corpora studies have been employed. The results show that power relations are crucial for the lexical choice when expressing other-directed discontent in Russian, i.e. emotion words are chosen according to the social status of both the experiencer and the causer. Moreover, there are different classifications of discontent-related words in Russian: 'rational' vs. irrational, 'expressive' vs. 'inexpressive', 'high', i.e. connected to the 'soul', and 'low', i.e. connected to the body. The comparative analysis of Russian, English and Spanish other-directed discontent has revealed both similarities and differences in the respective versions of the concept. All three languages have 'low vs. high intensity', 'external vs. internal' and 'significant vs. insignificant' dichotomies. Also metaphorical conceptualisation is similar, mostly as 'a substance in a container', although the theme of 'elements' prevails in Russian, 'hot fluid in a container' in English and 'possessed object' in Spanish. Etymology plays a certain role in conceptualisation in all three languages, especially in English (e.g. anger) and Russian (e.g. obida). In addition, differences in synonymic groups and recurrent antonyms (mir “peace” in Russian, paciencia “patience” in Spanish, and pleasure in English) reflect differences in respective naïve pictures of the world. On the morphosyntactic level, specific traits of Russian are 1) fusion with active verbs caused by conceptualisation of emotions as actions, and 2) derivation being the main means of lexical replenishment and the main salience indicator of a term. In reference to the discursive representation of other-directed discontent, the outline of the social component in the conceptual structure and the qualitative Russian, English and Spanish corpora studies resulted in the reconstruction of the subtextual discourse. The discourse is motivated by 'archaic', rural morality in Russian, which constructs the world as a common house, by patriarchal morality in Spanish, which propagates action as a sign of power, and by the rule of law in English, postulating anger as a valid means of self-assertion. |
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