engleski

Language of Emotions: Expressing Negative Emotions in English and Croatian

The subject of this thesis is language of emotions, that is, expression of negative emotions in Croatian versus Anglo-Saxon society. According to Adler, Rosenfeld and Proctor (2001), in the mainstream UK/US culture the unwritten rules of communication discourage open display of most emotions, especially negative ones. People do not shrink from making statements of fact or opinion, but when it comes to revealing their feelings they resort to indirect cues such as rhetorical questions or sarcasm. Croats, on the other hand, are generally considered direct in overt expression of both positive and negative emotions. This assumption is the main hypothesis to be tested in this study. According to the linguistic relativity interpretation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, language and culture influence each other. An important aspect of this view is vocabulary. So, if a language has a particularly rich vocabulary for a thing or activity, that thing or activity is very important in its culture. Thus, in order to see how a society deals with expression of emotions, it is necessary to investigate emotion-related vocabulary of its language. In order to test the hypothesis two different analyses were carried out. Analysis 1 aimed at exploring the language of recent journalistic articles dealing with divorce, a subject usually associated with negative emotions. Thus, 86 different texts treating either Mills/McCartney divorce battle or Pokos/Radeljak acrimonious divorce were gathered from the Internet. The texts were divided into three groups and compared in aspects of grammar, language and vocabulary. Analysis 2, on the other hand, was focused on emotion-related vocabulary contained in six different dictionaries. Considering the extensiveness of the material provided by those dictionaries, the sphere of interest has been narrowed down to verbs and phrases referring to active negative emotions such as anger, fear, frustration and annoyance.

language; emotions; Sapir-Whorf hypothesis; culture

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