Language, Heart, and Mind

Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available online at
http://dnb.d-nb.de.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for
at the Library of Congress.

The publication of the present volume was supported by the Department of
Humanities, University of Catania.

The cover illustration courtesy of Agata Szwajcowska.

ISSN 1437-5281

ISBN 978-3-631-82005-6 (Print)

E-ISBN 978-3-631-82038-4 (E-PDF)

E-ISBN 978-3-631-82039-1 (EPUB)

E-ISBN 978-3-631-82040-7 (MOBI)

DOI 10.3726/b16874

© Peter Lang GmbH

Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften

Berlin 2020

All rights reserved.

Peter Lang – Berlin ∙ Bern ∙ Bruxelles ∙ New York ∙ Oxford ∙ Warszawa ∙ Wien

All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any
utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without
the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to
prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions,
translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in
electronic retrieval systems.

This publication has been peer reviewed.

www.peterlang.com

About the author

The Editors
Prof. Dr habil. Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk is the head of the Department of Research in Language and Communication, State University of Applied Sciences in Konin. Her research focuses on cognitive semantics and pragmatics of language contrasts, corpus linguistics, and their applications in translation studies, lexicography, and online discourse analysis.

Dr. Valeria Monello is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Catania, Italy. Her main research themes include translation, media, and gender studies.

Dr. Marco Venuti is a tenured lecturer at the University of Catania, Italy. His research focuses on corpus-assisted analyses of political discourse, news discourse, and more recently social media.

About the book

Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk /
Valeria Monello / Marco Venuti (eds.)

Language, Heart, and Mind

A major premise of this book is that language use is critically conditioned by affective content and cognitive factors rather than being a case of objective computation and manipulation of structures. The 21 chapters of this book deals with how language interacts with emotion, and with mind and cognition, from both intralingual and cross-linguistic perspectives. The second major focus is the theoretical framework, best-suited for research relationships between language, cognition, and emotion as well as the effect that emotion has on the conceptualizer who constructs meanings based on language stimuli. Furthermore, the authors investigate how emotion and rational projections of events interact and what their consequences are in the conceptual world, media discourse, and translation.

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

List of Contributors

Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, Marco Venuti, Valeria Monello

Introduction

Part 1:Cognition, Emotion and Language

Paul A. Wilson

1. A Mindful Approach to Affairs of the Heart

Iain Halliday

2. With Rhyme and Reason: Revisiting Roman Jakobson’s “Linguistics and Poetics”

Aneta Dłutek

3. The Conceptual World(s) of Wisdom and Intelligence

Jacek Tadeusz Waliński

4. Cultural Conceptualizations of Love in English and Polish

Salvatore M. Ciancitto

5. Depicting Mother and Child Relationship: Love You Forever in Translation

Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk and Paul A. Wilson

6. Contextual Oppositeness in Elaborate Emotion Event Scenarios: Love-Hate Relationship

Judit Baranyiné Kóczy

7. Light-Blooded, Blood-Fumed and Blood-Rich: Cultural Conceptualizations of vér ‘blood’ in Hungarian

Anna Dąbrowska

8. The Power of Metaphors in Different Context-Related Registers: The Case of Metaphorical Idioms

9. I’ve been there, so I can empathize… Polish and English Verbal Expressions Denoting Empathy

Andrew HC. Chuang

10. How to Die (死: sǐ ) Properly in Modern Mandarin Chinese: A Cognitive-Pragmatic Account

Agnieszka Kałużna

11. The Issue of Cruelty in the Selected Translations of Dickens

Emanuela Campisi

12. Beyond Emotions (and Back): Non-verbal Communication in Language and Interaction

Marcin Trojszczak and Chiara Astrid Gebbia

13. Metaphors for Regulating Emotions – A Cognitive Corpus-Based Study of English, Italian, and Polish

Part 2:Cognition, Emotion and Media Discourse

Antonio Fruttaldo

14. Communing Affiliation and the Power of Bonding Icons in Collective Narratives: The Case of #GrowingUpGay

Angela Zottola

15. Inclusive (and Not) Uses of Pronouns and Honorifics in the British Press

Mariavita Cambria

16. “Are you really voting for your favourites?” Multimodal Genres and Ideology in Talent Shows

Donata Cucchiara

17. The Female Voice in Televised Political Debates: A Case Study

Giuliana Russo

18. Punctuation and Emotions: A Study on the Pragmatics of Punctuation in Texting

19. #ComeOutForTransEquality! Twitter Discourses on the Gender Recognition Act Reform

Valeria Monello and Francesca Vigo

20. Neither Soul Food, nor Slave Food Made You Fat: Passion and Affection in Soul Food Discourse

Valeria Monello

21. Creating “Moppa”: Identity Construction and Expressive Meaning

About the Authors

List of Contributors

Introduction

1 Inspiration and beginnings

In March 2017, English Language and Linguistics scholars at the Department of Humanities of the University of Catania organised a one-day workshop on ‘Language, Heart and Mind’. The workshop and its contributors brought together research themes that, while focusing on linguistic analysis, aimed at looking at language from a more comprehensive perspective, that is adding emotion and cognition to the broader picture, in order to understand how communication takes place.

During that first meeting, a network of scholars emerged and following meetings were organised at the University of Catania, widening the range of approaches and themes related to the original topic, and strengthening collaboration links between Italian and Polish universities. The collaboration also resulted in a themed panel at the 2019 international conference ‘Contacts and Contrasts’, held at the State University of Applied Sciences in Konin, and in a follow-up conference at the University of Lodz.

Some of the papers in the present volume are an outcome of the presentations and fruitful discussions during the workshops and the conferences.

We plan to continue and extend our research on the themes presented here, consolidating the existing network, as the relation between language, emotion and cognition has proven a challenging and fruitful field of enquiry.

2 Research objectives

A major premise of this volume is that rather than being a case of objective computation and manipulation of structures, language use is critically conditioned by affective content and cognitive factors.

One question that the chapters seek to address is how language interacts with emotion, on the one hand, and with mind and cognition, on the other hand. The volume looks into these interactions across communicative contexts and in both intralingual as well as cross-linguistic perspectives.

The second major question is about the theoretical frameworks (e.g. cognitive linguistics, pragmatics) and research methods (e.g. experimental ←11 | 12→methods, corpus approaches) that are best-suited to capture different facets of the relationships between language, cognition and emotion as well as the effect that emotion has on the conceptualizer who constructs meanings based on language stimuli. Furthermore, the authors investigate how emotion and rational projections of events interact and what their consequences are. Ronald W. Langacker first proposed (1987/1991, 2008) that “[m];ost broadly, a meaning consists of both conceptual content and a particular way of construing that content. The term construal refers to our manifest ability to conceive and portray the same situation in alternate ways” (2008: p. 43).

Aneta Dłutek, in the third study, investigates the extent to which conceptual networks applied to the concepts of wisdom and intelligence correlate or differ in the various corpus data analysed, while Jacek Tadeusz Waliński’s contribution in Chapter 4 discusses the extent to which cultural conceptualizations of love overlap between English and Polish and where they show differences, particularly in terms of their associative power.

In the fifth chapter Salvatore Ciancitto conducts a contrastive analysis of English and Italian concepts of motherly love in a picture book by Robert Munsch, considering both linguistic and visual layers of the original and the target language rendition. Chapter 6 by Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk ←12 | 13→and Paul A. Wilson focuses on the conceptual linguistic analysis of contextual oppositeness in the event scenarios of love-hate relationship in English and their Polish counterparts.

Marta Falkowska, in Chapter 9 of the first part of the volume, provides a semantic and syntactic analysis of selected Polish and English verbal expressions denoting an empathetic attitude. The study, based on extensive corpus data, identifies similarities in the usage of these verbs by English and Polish speakers. In Chapter 10. Andrew HC. Chuang looks at how the cultural avoidance of taboo expressions related to death in Mandarin Chinese, affects Mandarin Chinese syntactic patterning.

The eleventh chapter of the volume, by Agnieszka Kałużna, analyses how the issue of cruelty is dealt with in two Polish translations of Dickens’ Oliver Twist and to what extent the rendering of the original ensures or downplays the extensively discussed translator’s visibility. Emanuela Campisi, in the next chapter, entitled “Beyond emotions (and back): non-verbal communication in language and interaction”, focuses on non-verbal communication and its expression of both imagistic and emotional meaning on the one hand and their contribution to the content of the message on the other. The author argues for an integrated view on language in use as a multimodal system. Digital as well as analogical forms of representation are expressed there by verbal and non-verbal components.

The first part of the volume is completed by Marcin Trojszczak and Chiara Astrid Gebbia’s study, based on the analysis of over seventy metaphorical linguistic expressions from English, Italian, and Polish. The authors investigate a range of physical activities which are used to conceptualize the inhibition of basic emotions bearing positive and negative values such as anger, disgust, fear, sadness, on the one hand, and on the other, happiness, joy, and surprise.

Part 2 of the volume focuses on the interplay between heart and mind – emotions and reason – in contemporary media.

Chapter 14 by Antonio Fruttaldo presents an analysis of a corpus of tweets and explores how relational and emotional flows of affective bonding are related to the experience of being a young Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender/Transsexual, Intersex and Queer (LGBTIQ)+ individual. In Chapter 15 “Inclusive (and not) uses of pronouns and honorifics in the British Press” Angela Zottola investigates ←13 | 14→the use of pronouns and titles in the British tabloid and quality press, focusing on their referential function with respect to transgender people.