A Corpus Study of Linguistic-Cultural Conceptualization of FEAR in Chinese and Russian

A Corpus Study of Linguistic-Cultural Conceptualization of FEAR in Chinese and Russian Kawai Chui Hsiang-lin Yeh Jie-li Tsai National Chengchi University National Chengchi University National Chengchi University NO.64, Sec.2, ZhiNan Rd., NO.64, Sec.2, ZhiNan Rd., NO.64, Sec.2, ZhiNan Rd., Wenshan District Taipei City, Taiwan (ROC) Wenshan District Taipei City, Taiwan (ROC) Wenshan District Taipei City, Taiwan (ROC) kawai@nccu.edu.tw verayeh@nccu.edu.tw jltsai@nccu.edu.tw Abstract This study conducted a corpus analysis of the lexical and grammatical representation of the FEAR emotion in Taiwan Mandarin and Russian, focusing on four common fear words which mean ‘to fear’ and function as ‘predicate’. The dataset contains 4,433 instances of hàipà, 1,202 kĕpà instances, 733 bojat’sja instances, and 617 strashno instances. In the clause, the hàipà construction usually includes the nominative experiencer and the accusative stimulus; for kĕpà, the majority rather include the nominative stimulus only. In Russian, bojat’sja appears in the nominative construction, but strashno mainly occurs in the dative-impersonal construction, preferably without the mention of the stimulus. The results, together, reflect universality and specificity in the conceptualization of FEAR, which have to do with the agentive and the patientive views. The distinction between ‘what somebody does’ and ‘things happen to somebody’, and the emphasis on different emotion roles by virtue of structure shape linguistic-cultural conceptualization across the two languages. 1 Introduction For the understanding of the role of culture in human conceptualization, emotion has long been a focus of interest in many areas of study, including anthropology, psychology, and linguistics, among others (see the overviews in Ogarkova 2013). As “[l]anguage is at the nexus of cognition, on the one hand, and culture on the other” (Majid 2012: 432), the linguistic representation of emotion across languages is an essential indication of conceptualization and cultural universality and specificity. The past cross-linguistic comparison largely rest upon the fine-grained semantic analysis of emotion vocabularies which provided evidence for the reality of culture. Wierzbicka and colleagues (1992, 1999, 2007) also proposed universal semantic primitives as the natural metalanguage for examining the semantic similarities and differences of emotion words across languages. The relationship among language, culture, and conceptualization can further be manifested in grammatical constructions. Wierzbicka (1992, 1998, 1999) found that English favors the adjectival structure, whereas Russian prefers the verbal structure. The difference reflects the English speakers’ focus on the subjective inner state of the experiencer and the Russian speakers’ emphasis on the entity or thought linked with the emotion state respectively. In Semin et al. (2002), the Dutch emotion lexicons were found to have more emotion nouns, suggesting independence and individuality in the culture; in Hindustani lexicon, the use of more emotion verbs rather reveals the culture of interdependence. In discourse, Pavlenko (2002) studied the cross-linguistic expression of emotions in oral narratives produced by English and Russian subjects. The study confirmed the use of the adjectival structure in English and that of the verbal structure in Russian. The narrative data further attested that the Russian narrators focused PACLIC 32 123 32nd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation Hong …

Content truncated to 500 words