engleski

Feelings, emotions, passions & affect: Universal vs. culturally biased frames of the semantic analysis

This paper tries to answer several questions concerning the concepts/terms of emotions, feelings, passions & affect. Are they matter of mere terminological shif tor paradigm shift? If the latter is true, can any of the paradigms be pronounced to be universal. If so, which one, and how does the presumably universal paradigm relate to the remaining ones. Autors believe that we are dealing with three distinct paradigms which in spite of their apparent resemblance should be consistently differentiated since each of them capture the extra-linguistic universe in a proper way. The paper is based on the data drawn from Croatian Church Slavonic (CCS), a Middle Age idiom (XII-XVI.c.) primarily used as (Christian) liturgical language in Croatian lands, a successor of the Old Church Slavonic. The research methodology and its conduct are higly determined by two major features of CCS: 1. its bookishness ; 2. virtually all of its texts are translations (from Greek or Latin). The corpus consists of 3029 instances of the lexems which lexicalize six basic concepts of sensitiveness. The lexems are derived from the following stems: ljub- (for love) ; nenavidê - (for hate) ; upva- and nad- (for hope) ; strah- and boê - (for fear) ; radь - and veselь - (for joy), peč alь - and tug- (for sadness). The aim of this paper is to evaluate afore-mentioned paradigms (emotions vs. feelings vs. passions and affect) as tools for the semantic analyis of CCS in order to indicate the status of each paradigm in terms of their cultural and historical determination. The research shows that the paradigm of emotions is not particularly adequate conceptual frame for the description of CCS data since bodily manifestations are relatively rarely expressed, and when they are, it is predominantly in the field of the lexis of merely one concept, namely sadness. In addition to that, causes and consequences expressed in the texts concerning occurrences of particular lexems dealt with are predominantly morally evaluated, God being the axe of evaluation. This feature cannot be appropriately acknowledged by the paradigm of emotions. On the other hand, the paradigm of feelings proves to capture adequately meaning elements common to different lexems, stems or concepts as well as their respective significant differences. In the case of CCS, explications of the type Wierzbicka creates for feelings can be further specified by application of the paradigm of passions. Among indications that paradigm of passions is an appropriate frame for the description of CCS, the following should be emphasized: 1. prototypical actant structures - actants can be typified as: i. (God’ s) man, ii. God, iii. an enemy of a (God’ s) man ; 2. structure of the circumstantials of causes and consequences connected to the occurrence of the analyzed lexems. Components of circumstantials structure are typified in accordance with the actant typification. To conclude, the paradigm of emotions, even though possible tool for the semantic analysis of the CCS proves to be poorly adequate in comparison with the paradigm of feelings, especially when combined with the paradigm of passions. The paradigm of feelings proves to be simple and adequate basic conceptual frame for expressing structural similarities and distinctions among lexems and stems which lexicalize concepts of psychological aspect of human life. That is why the research can be said to corroborate the universality of the paradigm of feelings. The paradigm of passions & affect proves to be higly valuable, at least in the case of Church Slavonic data since it provides conceptual frame in which structural relations among concepts together with the stems and lexems which lexicalize them, become clearly distinguishable. In addition to that, the results of this research seems to indicate: 1. validity and usefulness of the often neglected system of passions on a concrete corpus of linguistic data ; 2. the proof of its complementarity with the paradigm of feelings ; 3. the proof of its incomplementarity with the paradigm of emotions.

emotions; feelings; passions; affect; Croatian Church Slavonic

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