Language and emotions

Language and emotions, different in form but too close in meaning. Language competence is independent of emotion, most linguistic performance is tinged by emotional content. When human brain started to develop, human beings began to communicate in different ways. Initially they used different unusual voice and then signs. The most perfect way of exchanging information or in another word communication-language aided human beings in every sphere of their life. If language helps writers to create literary works emotions make writer to write them. Combination of language and emotion is a productive literary work. These two terms may seem unrelated words belonging two different spheres- psychology and linguistics. But if we dive in these fields deeper we can see their stable relationship. In his point of view one of the most well-known American linguist and political writers Noam Chomsky said “In my opinion one should not speak of a “relationship” between linguistics and psychology, because linguistics is part of psychology”. He considers that linguistics and psychology not only have relationship, but also linguistics cannot be imagined without psychology being a part of it. As a continuation of his view scientist says: “Language serves essentially for the expression of thought.” This idea means that our language is an assistant of our mind and its duty is to explain what we think or sense.

All have diversity of meanings in mind when we say “emotion. But, there is no single acknowledged scientific definition of the term “emotion”. This term is defined variously in each field according to the object that is being investigated. In Oxford Dictionary the term defines: “A strong feeling deriving from one’s circumstances, mood, or relationships with others”, “Instinctive or intuitive feeling as distinguished from reasoning or knowledge.”

When language is viewed as a structural system – as vehicle that can be used to discuss or describe anything, its relationship to emotional experiencing is tangential. This means that language and emotion have no necessary relationship at all. The primary structural levels of language, phonology, syntax, and the semantic lexicon, provide tools, equally capable of verbalizing about the cosmos, an engineer’s diagram, or a personal feeling. In this view, language and emotions differ intrinsically, like bicycles and fish.

Evolutionarily, it has been suggested that two signaling systems underlie human communication, one with a limbic basis, corresponding to animal vocalization, and the other cortically represented and unique to humans. In this view, emotive considerations belong to paralanguage, which, by definition, lies outside the language system. To understand the evolution of human language, the debate must focus on the emergence of symbol systems and grammar.

Another perspective on the relationship between human emotion and human language holds that language has roots in emotional expression. Cries, songs, and shouts are seen as motivating linguistic development. Emotional language as well as “automatic” or formulaic expressions have their origin in earlier evolutionary development (Code, 2005), and continue to hold an important place in linguistic competence. In this view, human language is not independent of or separate from emotional and formulaic speech, but is made up of two highly integrated processing modes, novel and holistic (Van Lancker Sidtis, 2004).

Language expresses emotion both indirectly and directly, implicitly or explicitly, intentionally or not, using different “levels” of linguistic form: phonetic, syntactic, semantic, and different “domains,” including pragmatics. Infants quickly learn much about communicative interaction from prelinguistic vocal information. Infants recognize their mother’s voices shortly after birth. A range of attitudes and emotions is identifiable in the melodies of mother’s speech to their infants, which appears across cultures. Developmental studies comparing normal and language delayed children document maturational schedules in abilities to recognize emotions in speech.

The esthetic emotion depends on an appreciation of beauty in the use of language. It calls for readers to achieve an esthetic distance from the work (Cupchik, 2002) and for them to have had a sufficient experience with literature to develop an appreciation of its skillful use. Consider, for instance, the first stanza of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” published in 1816 (Coleridge, 1977): In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

The iambic rhythm, the assonance on the sound of “ah,” the alliterations (e.g. Kubla Khan), the rhymes (e.g. Khan, ran, man), the exoticism (Xanadu), may all move us in a way akin to music. However, our understanding of the propositional content of literature also elicits emotions. In “Kubla Khan,” the content is difficult. We come to understand it either from several readings and much contemplation, or from knowing some of Coleridge’s preoccupations, or from having someone educated explain it to us (e.g., Paglia, 2005). The poem is a metaphor for the place of art and the artist in society. Hence, the pleasure dome is a metonymic form (synecdoche) for art in general. The sacred river is a metaphor for the stream of artistic creativity that flows through society. The poem evokes further images: the source of creativity in nature and sexuality (“as if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing”), the potential enmity between the artist and society (“ancestral voices prophesying war”), an image of the artist (“A damsel with a dulcimer”), and the status of the artist as demi-god (“for he on honey dew hath fed / and drunk the milk of paradise”). Some poetry, such as Mallarme’s, makes its emotional effect almost entirely in terms of its music rather than its propositional content. It was Mallarme who reminded his painter friend, Degas, that poetry was made from words, not ideas.