Linguistic Representation of the Emotional State of «SURPRISE» in American English

Kuraleva Tatiana ORCID: 0000-0003-3738-9198 PhD in Philology Senior lecturer, Department of English philology and translation, St. Petersburg State University 199034, Russia, Saint Petersburg, nab. University, 11 t.kuraleva@spbu.ru Pavlenko Elena ORCID: 0000-0001-7276-1448 PhD in Philology Senior lecturer, Department of English philology and translation, St. Petersburg State University 199034, Russia, Saint Petersburg, nab. University, 11 e.a.pavlenko@spbu.ru

Vyunova Ekaterina ORCID: 0000-0001-9977-7829 PhD in Philology Associate professor, Department of English philology and translation, St. Petersburg State University 199034, Russia, Saint Petersburg, nab. University, 11 e.vyunova@spbu.ru

introduction

Currently, various social and psychological aspects are increasingly coming into the field of linguistic science. Linguists are primarily interested in various ways of linguistic representation of a particular fragment of objective reality. Emotional states have not been considered an object of linguistics for a long time, but in the second half of the XX century, the first works on the methods of verbalization of emotions appeared. In modern linguistics, there is a great interest in the linguistic theory of emotions ^[12], emotional concepts ^{[4, 7]} and a range of grammatical constructions describing emotions ^{[8, 9]}. The inclusion of emotions in the object of linguistic research raises the question of the need to expand and clarify the approach to the linguistic categorization of emotions and to identify the variable possibilities of their verbalization, taking into account the diversity of intentions of communicants [2 p. 64]. The subjective nature of emotional states causes difficulties arising during their verbalization. In addition, emotions are more often represented in the language in clusters and represent complex or mixed emotions. At the same time, the specificity of the choice of language means is often associated with the type of linguistic personality and is situationally determined ^[13]. In connection with the above, we can conclude about the complexity of the formalized description of emotions, despite the presence of a large number of works devoted to the linguistics of emotions. In addition, there is a lack of theoretical works using the data of language corpora to build theoretical models.

METHODOLOGY

This article presents an analysis of language constructions describing, describing the emotion of surprise. Surprise is the most short-term emotion, which is quickly replaced by another emotion ^{[16, p.98]}, i.e. it is often a complex emotion. Thus, the linguistic realization of such an unstable emotional state is of particular interest. For the purposes of a comprehensive and detailed description, we will limit ourselves to cases when the speech describes the emotional state of a third person (a non-preferential description of emotions) that has an external expression. In other words, only those cases fall into the circle of phenomena of interest to us when the predicate in the linguistic construction are verbs with the meaning "to look, to seem". Such a choice of language material is due, firstly, to the fact that such an expression of emotions is as subjective as possible and, therefore, is very difficult for a formalized description. Secondly, as N. G. Talashova notes, in the non-egor-preferential description of emotions, communicants use more diverse constructions and more complex linguistic means ^{[10, p. 132]}.

The data of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (Corpus of Contemporary American English) were taken as the research material ^[14]. This corpus is a balanced corpus of modern English in its American version and allows you to track changes in the language and identify linguistic models. The genre balance of the included texts and the large volume (more than one billion words) provide a reliable representation of linguistic phenomena ^[15].

results

As mentioned above, emotions as an object of linguistic science have become the subject of numerous studies conducted on the material of different languages. If it is important for psychologists to study the nature of emotions, functions and forms of their manifestation, then for linguists the main task is to study linguistic ways of representing emotional states.

In any language, a lexicon of emotions is distinguished, and these lexicons are similar to each other. In many languages, there will be more emotive lexemes that actualize negative emotions in quantitative terms than those that express positive emotions. Positive emotions are expressed in different languages more monotonously than negative ones ^{[18, p.59]}.

Despite a number of regularities, it seems rather difficult to present a formalized model of linguistic representation of emotional states due to the subjective nature of emotions and a wide variety of lexemes nominating emotions. In addition, there is no consensus among psychologists about which mental phenomena relate to emotional reactions. A broad or narrow interpretation allows scientists to attribute a variety of phenomena of the human psyche to emotional states. The number of basic emotions in different researchers ranges from five to ten. Finally, the binary division of emotions into positive and negative is not universal. As K. notes Izard, the true sign of emotion can only be determined by taking into account the broad context. At the same time, the author attributes the emotion of surprise to neutral emotions, i.e. to emotions that do not have an emotional sign ^[1]. 

The identification of language models describing the emotion of surprise involves the consideration of constructions that are used by the speaker in the situation of describing an emotional state. The study of grammatical constructions fits into the modern paradigm, according to which the subject of linguistics is larger linguistic units. The concept of construction was introduced into scientific use by Ch . Fillmore and his co–authors are P. Kay and K. O'Connor.  According to the grammar of constructions, the meaning of a construction does not consist directly of the meaning of its lexical units and syntactic connections between them; the meaning of a construction consists of the complex interaction of its constituent units ^[6]. In other words, the construction is a linguistic structure that has a plan of expression or a plan of content that is not derived from the meaning or form of the components ^{[5, 6 p. 19, 17 p. 9]}.

So, let's move on to the consideration of constructions describing the emotion of surprise related to a third person. As mentioned above, cases of visible manifestation of emotion fall into the range of phenomena under consideration. As O. E. Filimonova notes, in statements describing the emotional state of third parties, two main propositions are distinguished: an emotional reaction and its cause. At the same time, an important role is played by the external representation of the emotional state ^{[11, p. 72]}.

So, let's move on to considering the corpus of examples. As the analysis shows, it is possible to distinguish several constructions used by the speaker to describe the emotional state of a third person. All the cases considered can be divided into two groups: statements with one proposition and statements with two propositions.

Statements with one proposition make up more than half of all examples. Here we have included those cases in which there is only an indication of the emotion of surprise. For example: The big man looked surprised. Even the reporters seemed surprised. In such cases, the communicant uses the construction: SUBJECT + LINK VERB + SURPRISED.

Statements containing two propositions represent a heterogeneous group. Among the cases considered, it seems possible to distinguish the following models: a statement expressing the emotion of surprise and the cause of its occurrence, a statement expressing the emotion of surprise and the time of the emotion, a statement expressing the emotion of surprise and the accompanying emotion, and a statement expressing the emotion of surprise and the action accompanying this emotion. Let's consider these models in more detail.

1.        A statement with two propositions (emotion + reason).

As N. G. Talashova notes, this method of verbalization of emotions is more typical for male speech behavior ^{[10, p. 81]}. In addition, the speech of men is distinguished by the desire to mask emotion by using metaphors or slang words [3 p. 65]. In our opinion, the use of grammatical constructions with the meaning of the cause also serves the purpose of masking emotions, since it shifts the emphasis from the emotion itself to its cause. A wide range of grammatical constructions used to express emotions is also interesting. Attention is drawn to the fact that the subordinate clause of comparison as part of a grammatical construction acquires an additional causal meaning.

2.        A statement with two propositions (emotion + indication of time).

As can be seen from the examples, constructions describing emotion and temporal characteristics are polypredicative structures. At the same time, the second proposition may include both an indication of the duration of the emotional state and the moment of its occurrence. In this case, the grammatical construction may have an additional causal meaning. Such ambiguity, in general, is characteristic of the semantic field "temporal relations", as evidenced by the presence in the inventory of linguistic units of unions that have both causal and temporal meaning (since, now that).

3.        A statement with two propositions (two emotions).

It has already been noted that the emotion of surprise is short-lived and is quickly replaced by another emotion. As the analysis of corpus data shows, the emotion of surprise can be replaced by both a positive emotion (pleased, thrilled) and a negative one (confused, shocked, puzzled, nervous, offended, irritated).At the same time, lexemes nominating negative emotion are more frequent in such constructions.

4.        A statement with two propositions (emotion and action).

As can be seen from the examples, the relationship between the two propositions is based on equality. At the same time, in such constructions, the emotion of surprise can be represented as a longer or short-term, rapidly changing action.

conclusions

So, we have considered cases of non-preferential description of emotions, since such a description of the emotional state seems to be more subjective and is of interest from the point of view of identifying language models. As the analysis of corpus data has shown, despite all the variety of grammatical constructions, the ways of expressing emotions are quite amenable to a formalized description. The analysis also showed that the use of the lexeme nominating surprise in certain grammatical constructions allows you to create additional meanings within this construction. Thus, we observe the deployment of discursive meanings in the utterance, or their accumulation. In addition, it is in the grammatical construction that the realization of the negative discursive prosody of lexemes with the meaning of surprise is observed.