Tiers for Fears and Other Emotions: A Cross-Linguistic Approach to Psych Lexis and Syntax

Abstract

A central issue in the comparative study of any linguistic category and its patterns is the necessity of choosing specific exponents in the target languages. This is particularly relevant for lexical domains rendering subjective and highly culturally informed phenomena such as emotions. We propose an alternative to the common solution of translating from English via native speaker inquiry and/or dictionaries. Elaborating upon current methodology in typological studies, we devised a systematic elicitation task which incorporates insights from cross-cultural psychological and anthropological research on human emotions. Our method facilitates the elicitation of extensive comparable inventories of emotion lexemes, many of which lack straightforward English equivalents and thus could not have been captured by a traditional translation-based approach. We show that this method can be used to investigate specific structural phenomena such as the psych alternation from a cross-linguistic perspective while minimizing translational bias.