EXTENSIONALIST
SEMANTICS, COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS AND EMOTION EXPRESSIONS
José Manuel Martín Morillas, Universidad de Granada (Spain)
1 Semantics and the Semantic Description of Emotive
Expressions
2 Extensionalist Representations
3 A Semantic Model for Representing Emotion Experience
4 Typologies of Models of Emotion Expressions
1 Semantics and the Semantic Description of Emotive Expressions
In theory,
the semantic description of language should take into account the four-fold
relationship between reality, signs, language and culture. More particularly, the
job of semantic models is to explain the relationship between (1) extension,
(2) intension, (3) motivation, and (4) expression. For any semantic domain,
meaning works because there is an extensional interface between language and
reality; an intensionalist relationship between denotative signs and concepts
that produce denotation and sense, not just reference; a motivational basis,
i.e. a cognitive-experiential grounding for creating signs and sense; and an
expressive basis, that is, a formal-functional system serving as formal signs
for the concepts.
In this
paper I intend to borrow ideas from two semantic approaches, namely procedural
semantics and cognitive linguistics to describe semantically so-called emotion
expressions. The semantic approach which Miller and Johnson-Laird introduced in
their monumental work Language and
Perception (1976) is interesting because it is an attempt to map
semantic-conceptual structures directly onto reality. Theirs is a thoroughly
naturalistic semantics, with a strong extensional orientation: language is
intended “to pick out” the world (cf. Abbot, 1997). However, we know, from the
work of cognitive linguists, that this “picking out” is not entirely
unmediated. Rather, the way language represents reality is mediated by the way
the mind works. This includes what G. Fauconnier's calls 'backstage cognition', plus other types of general and special
cognitive processes such as those studied by Langacker (1991): construal,
perspective, saliency, elaboration, framing, and cohering. Another important
function of the mind is to create mental models (cf. Johnson-Laird, 1981;
Johnson-Laird and Oatley, 1989) as well as analogical, projective, idealized
cognitive models to make sense of experience (Kövecses, 1990). Again, cognitive
anthropologists remind us that these mental or cognitive models may go through
a filter, namely the cultural models of language and thought in a given
linguo-culture (Holland and Quinn, 1987; Shweder, 1993; Martín Morillas y Pérez
Rull, 1998).
As regards
emotion expressions, it is useful to distinguish two main types. On the one
hand, some emotive expressions are straightforwardly ‘extensionalist’, that is,
they can be represented linguistically by models that “read out” the semantic
representation directly from the naturalistic experience, with minimal
“projective elaboration” or “amplification” --just the necessary to do the work
of interfacing language and cognition, for example, by filtering, highlighting
or emphasising the salience of one aspect of the emotion episode at the expense
of another. For instance, extensionalist expressions would be: "I was frightened / He looked scared / She
was shaking with fear...." and the like, all of which convey in
various different ways intensional
concepts of FEAR.
On the
other hand, some models of emotive expressions rely on analogical, projective
cognitive models (e.g. metaphoric and metonymic models), which may be
conventionally entrenched, or be the unconventional result of idiosyncratic
meaning-construction strategies. For instance, analogical-projective instance
might be: "I was filled with terror
/ He was seized by unspeakable terror / She was white with fright...", and
the like, which convey the experience of FEAR by means of experiential gestalts
of CONTAINER, FORCE, and other analogical models.
It can be
argued that in representing semantically emotive expressions we need both an
extensionalist-intensionalist type of semantic representation format for the
denotative concepts, and an intensional-motivational one for the analogical,
projective ones.
2 Extensionalist Representations
In keeping
with the above, for the extensionalist description of emotive expressions, we
may start with a naturalistic model of motions. Here we rely on the account
that psycho-biologists have to offer on the nature and function of emotion
experience. Following Buck’s (1986) well-known psycho-biological model, we can
describe the emotive experience as follows. Emotions are causal natural events:
the impact of a particular external stimulus produces an affective internal
stimulus, which is filtered by the relevant prime arousal system and the
person’s previous experiences with the stimulus. This affective stimulus is
registered at two levels, a physiological level and a cognitive level.
Physiologically, the registering is accompanied with the onset of homeostatic
mechanisms (Emotion I) which, in turn, trigger spontaneous expressive
tendencies (Emotion II), as well as a subjective awareness (Emotion III). All
three types of registering are intertwined by a complex feedback mechanism
linking bodily manifestations, hormonal, endocrinal, etc mechanisms, and
subjective experience. Now on the cognitive level, and in order to cope with
this stimulus, the individual appraises or labels this complex feedback on the
basis of past experience, of the import of the present situation, of more or
less unconscious motives, etc. Once this interpretation has taken place, the
individual can make a goal-directed response. This response may follow some learned
display rules or expressive tendencies (for example, about what kind of
response is appropriate in a given situation). The following diagram sketches
this psycho-biological model of emotions:
Stimulus Sensation
Subjective
Bodily Behavioural
Register Register Expression Expression
Physiological
Register
EXTERNAL INTERNAL EMOTIVE BODILY BEHAVIOURAL
CAUSE REGISTER EXPERIENCE
RESPONSE RESPONSE
The causal
relationships between these elements can be quite complex. In theory, any event
external to the self-experiencer, or any event within the self-experiencer (eg.
thoughts, sensations), is liable to cause an emotive event: for instance, a
visual or an auditory experience (seeing something, hearing something), a
cognitive experience (a thought or a stream of thoughts about something), even
another emotion (emotions may cause chains of emotions, a phenomenon called ‘affective amplification’). Again, the
response to en emotive event may be quite complex, depending on a number of factors.
Some responses may be just a bodily amplification of the bodily effect (like
crying from sorrow, or jumping with laughter), other responses may include
acting on the dispositional potential of the emotion (like doing something
for/against/to oneself or someone else), or else acting out the emotion by
following display rules, which are usually mediated by learned cultural scripts
(these of course may be flouted or elaborated upon). Likewise, evidently, not
all emotive events are of the same quality and tenor (qualia, in the jargon of psychologists), their differences
depending on the interplay between perceptual, emotive, cognitive and cultural
factors. According to most researchers, emotions can be classified roughly
into: (1) sensations; (2) feelings, (3) affects and moods, depending on
differences in degree of awareness, expressive tendencies, cognitive
involvement and cultural shaping. For instance, being startled by a loud thump
is not the same as becoming angry, embarrassed or homesick.
In sum,
emotions are to be understood as complex internal events causally connected
(distally or proximally) to perceptions, sensations, cognition, dispositions
and individual and socio-cultural behaviour. These causal relationships may
feed back on themselves. A visual experience may lead to a feeling, the feeling
to a thought, the thought to a mood, the mood to a behaviour, the behaviour to
more feelings, thoughts, actions, moods, etc. and so on. A behavioural response
to an emotive event (e.g. running out of fear) may cause one to feel
embarrassment, the embarrassment to feelings of self-rejection, the
self-rejection to social avoidance, the social avoidance to depression, and so
on. (And from there to the shrink.)
3 A Semantic Model for Representing Emotion Experience
An
interesting question arises: How does this psycho-biological system relate to
language? There may be perhaps modular (cf. Jackendoff, 1997) connections
between this emotive system and the linguistic system and other modular systems
in the mind. Under this view, minimally, we can envision the operation of
language at two interface levels: at the cognitive label and at the expressive
level. Following the modular model, with language as a module of its own,
language may be used as an expressive amplification system to convey the
emotion (emotional language). In this case, language would be part of the
‘readout’ expressive system (together with non-verbal communications, gestures,
behavioural dispositions, social display rules, etc).
Given that we
have (a) emotive experiences (involving body, mind, culture: social behaviour,
social norms and rules), and (b) linguistic experiences for emotions, the
question we aim to pursue is, How do the latter serve the function of
representing, i.e., “reading out”, the former?
Our aim
here is precisely to propose a model of how emotive expressions are “assembled”
and deployed for reading out the emotive experience in question.
It can be
argued that the first semantic link between emotive experience and verbal
representation develops naturally, that is ontogenetically. Repeated episodes
of emotional experience may cause children to internalise what will be referred
to as an inductive-deductive propositional
schema, containing a series of percept-concepts
standing for the core elements of the naturalistic emotive experience. These
percept-concepts can be semantically represented as follows:
S = Cause-stimulus (proximal, remote,
internal, external)
W = Self-Experiencer
X = Affective Episode (E-I: Emotion /
E-II: Feeling / E-III: Mood)
Y = Bodily Manifestation
Z = Behavioural Expression
To
illustrate this, consider the expression:
(1) At the sight of the man, she ran away trembling with fear
Underlying
this expression is the following propositional schema:
S W X Y Z
A semantic
model of extensional emotive events must explain and describe the move from the
underlying level of representation encoded in the emotive propositional schema
all the way to the emotive expression itself. We have argued above that there
may be two ways in which this is achieved:
a) an extensionalist “read-out” move:
here denotative concepts used for denoting the elements of the emotive emerge
event directly from the percepts-concepts (eg. “I was pale with fear”)
b) an analogical-projective move: here
metaphoric and metonymic concepts and cognitive-cultural models grounded on
experiential or cultural gestalts are used for encapsulating the elements of
the emotive event (e.g. “She went white”)
The
extensionalist move consists in representing the elements in the propositional
schema by means of extensionalist denotative concepts that pick out
experiential percepts. The construction of an emotion expression is achieved by
deploying percept-concepts mediated by cognitive processes (Langacker, 1991) in
charge of constructing the event's construal:
- perspective
- filtering
- saliency
That is, a
given emotive event may be construed in propositional schemas by displaying a
different types of perspective, filtering, and saliency. For example, in
reporting a fear episode, the speaker may highlight the subjective experience
of fear only (1), without “reading out” from the event the cause of the fear
(2), or the bodily manifestation occurring with the fear (3), or any
behavioural response that the fear may have caused (4):
(1) I
grew scared
(2) I
was scared of the noise
(3) I
was shaking with fear at the thought of him coming
(4) I
hid under the bed, scared…
……
In moving
from propositional schema to expression, we can use several levels of semantic
representation. To do so, we will adopt a standard pragma-psycholinguistic
model distinguishing three stages:
1.
The
Conception stage: to convey a message, first, propositional templates and schemas
are called out from memory;
2.
The
Formulation stage: next, abstract syntactic structures (depending on universal
and language-particular rules of the language in question) are called out to
encapsulate the propositional concepts;
3.
The
Expression stage: finally, surface structures are deployed to convey the
concepts in accordance with universal and language-particular pragmatic rules
of message and utterance formation.
In
accordance with this model, we can posit the following representation formats:
A) At the
Conception stage:
1. A
propositional schema reads out the
psycho-biological experience and construes, filters, and highlights the
percepts of the emotive event
B) At the
Formulation stage:
2. A
predicative schema represents the construed propositional schema by
encapsulating the highlighted elements in a pre-syntactic semantic format with
denotational percept-concepts.
C) In the
Expression stage:
3. An
expression structure represents the predicative schema by expressing it in a
well-formed syntactic-pragmatic construction.
To
illustrate again, given an emotive episode, such as, for instance, reporting
the experience of a woman´s fear and shock cause by witnessing a car accident,
we might proceed a follows:
A)
Representing the full-fledged propositional schema:
S = a visual experience (eg. seeing a car
accident)
W = the self-experiencer (woman witness)
X=
feeling fear
Y = shock
Z = a behavioural response as a
result of the emotion (e.g. leaving the scene…)
B)
Representing the predicative format for this schema:
[P-emot (<feel>) {(x1 i : <witness:
woman>) Experiencer (x2: <fear> <shock>) Emotion/Bodily
Manifestation
[(P-visual experience (x1: j:) (x2: <seeing
an accident>) Causative Stimulus]] Perceptual Process]]] Emotive Process
C) Representing the expressions. Here a number of possibilities exist, depending on the topic-focus (pragma-syntactic) packaging of the propositional and predicative elements: as:
- The
woman was shocked with fear at the sight of the accident
- The
woman was trembling with shocking fear
at the sight of the accident
- The
woman, frightened at the sight of the accident, began to tremble in shock
- The
sight of the accident shocked the woman, who left the scene trembling with fear
……..
We will next
offer a sample typology of emotion expressions showing various ways in which
cognitive processes might be involved in construing, highlighting and filtering
elements from the general propositional schema. Likewise, we will show a sample
of expressive formulas for encoding these schemas. We will first give examples
involving extensionalist models, and next examples involving
analogical-projective models.
4 Typologies of Models of Emotion Expressions
A) Typologies can be set up for the different
ways in which the elements of the propositional schema can be construed,
filtered, and highlighted. Thus:
1. Ascribing to sb a feeling (E-II)
“SHE WAS SAD” : (S)à W-X-(Y-Z)
2. Ascribing to sb a sensorial emotion (E-I)
“SHE FELT DISGUST” : (S)à W-X-(Y-Z)
3. Ascribing to sb a mood (E-III)
“SHE FELT HOMESICK” : (S)à W-X-(Y-Z)
4. Ascribing to sb a feeling caused by an
external stimulus
“SHE WAS ANNOYED AT HIS WORDS” : S à W-X-(Y-Z)
5. Ascribing to sb a bodily effect
“SHE BLUSHED”: (S)à W-(X)àY-(Z)
6. Ascribing to sb a bodily effect, caused by a
feeling
"SHE GREW PALE WITH FEAR”: (S)à W-XàY-(Z)
7. Ascribing to sb a behavioural response, caused
by a feeling
“SHE JUMPED WITH JOY”: (S)à W-X-(Y)à Z
8. Ascribing to sb a behavioural response, caused
by an external stimulus
“SHE LAUGHED AT THE JOKE”: Sà W-(X-Y)à Z
9. Ascribing to sb a feeling caused by a
cognitive internal event
THE THOUGHT OF IT SADDENED HER: SàWSàX-(Y-Z)
B) An alternative typology can be set up for
the different expressive possibilities involving a given schema. Thus:
1.
Ascribing
to an experiencer an emotion caused by an external/internal event
1a. Inessive Models:
a) Stative
predicative ascription with oblique complementation:
He was annoyed at her words
He was jealous of their success
b) Inchoative-lexical
change of state ascribed to experiencer:
She saddened at the thought of
them going away
c) Inchoative
lexico-grammatic predicative ascription with resultative subject complement:
She grew / became sad
1b. Causative Models
a) Lexical
(synthetic)
Her words annoyed him
It
saddened her ...
b) Lexico-gramamtic
(prepositional)
She laughed with joy
She stepped back in
fear
c) Lexico-grammatical
(analytic)
It
made her sad ...
Their
success made him jealous
II. ANALOGICAL MODELS: COGNITIVE-CULTURAL
MODELS
The ways in
which emotive experience can be represented by means of analogical and
projective models is open-ended. We find here two main types:
a) implicitly or explicitly entrenched
models
b) idiosyncratic models
The first
type involves models which are either opaque or transparent, and which are
conventionalised. For example, the use of the CONTAINER IMAGE SCHEMA, She was fearful of him - She was filled with
anger.
The second
type involves models which are the result of non-conventional personal,
idiosyncratic meaning-construction strategies.
We will offer next some examples of both
entrenched and idiosyncratic models.
1) She reined in her anger
W (SELF) = CONTROLLER; X (ANGER) = WILD ANIMAL;
2) He
felt all the warmth drain out of him
W (SELF) = CONTAINER; X-Y = LIQUID;
3) The thought chilled her
W (SELF) = OBJECT; X-Y = EXPERIENCE OF COLDNESS = CHILLING
4) Like a cancer, the anger had metastasized throughout her system until it now lived in every tissue
X = ANALOGICAL MODEL = CANCER GROWTH
5) She felt her anxiety level rise
X = UP = INTENSITY
6) It left him with no target for the monstrous, smoldering mass of rage writhing within him, but he got over it, got past it, .. the rage had gone away
W (SELF) = UNCONTROLLABLE AGENT; X (ANGER) = INSIDE CONTAINER (BODY); FEROCIOUS ANIMAL/MONSTER / = FIRE; EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE = OBJECT IN MOTION (PATH)
8) He felt the frustration pouring out of him
W (SELF) = CONTAINER; X (FRUSTRATION) = LIQUID
5 Conclusions
We have
argued for the need to distinguish two types of semantic models for the purpose
of describing emotion expressions. On the one hand, we need extensionalist models
(Miller and Johnson-Laird, 1976; Abbott, 1997) for expressions that “read
out” semantic emotive percept-concepts directly from experiential reality;
and, on the other, we need analogical, projective models for expressions that
are grounded on, and map cognitive-cultural models onto, the percepts that
ultimately refer to emotive experiences (Kövecses, 1990; Barcelona Sánchez,
1986). Both models serve different semantic needs: one takes the direct route,
the other the indirect. Both show two alternative but complementary ways in
which language, concepts and reality may interact.
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