Presentation

Catherine Paulina

The complex relation between emotions and affect at large, where the various concepts of emotion, emotion feelings, and affective stance all appear to overlap, is an important area of current linguistic research into language use.

The different articles in the present volume are all concerned with emotions as expressions of the feelings or sensations we experience. While sensations are caused by states of affair, such as pain, fear, pleasure, sadness or surprise, feelings can be defined as subjective states of experience: they are seen as reactions to emotions. Emotions and feelings thus appear to be two sides of the same coin, which may explain why the expression “emotion feelings” is often used. Damasio1 draws a useful distinction between emotion and feeling:

[...] some feelings relate to emotions, there are many that do not: all emotions generate feelings if you are awake and alert, but not all feelings originate in emotions.

The objective of this volume is not to investigate the differential emotions theories but rather to look into the way emotions are linguistically represented. While the importance of recognising a certain interdependence between emotions, linguistic representation and cognition is certainly acknowledged, the approach adopted by the different authors is not concerned with conceptual acts as such, but rather with the linguistic manifestations of emotions in language and discourse and with the analysis of the meaning and functions of emotion words and constructions that are used to encode emotions.

This volume aims to investigate the intricate relationship between emotions, language, and discourse genres, and in doing so, raises two series of questions. Firstly, how are emotions encoded in language, and how is the interlocutive relation established to communicate emotions? Secondly, given that the relation between emotions and language is context-dependent and genre related, the

Tanam n°5i /2018