Emotional linguistic relativity and cross-cultural research
Résumé
The now classical question of "linguistic relativity", which hypothesizes that language can influence thought and behavior, becomes a more complex hypothesis when applied to the semantic domain of emotions. This is because the linguistic encoding of emotions can influence not only the way we think about them, but also the way we experience them. This chapter discusses the implications of "emotional linguistic relativity" and reviews the psychological theories of emotions that support this hypothesis. I then show that our current linguistic knowledge about the ways languages across the world encode emotions, although limited in many respects, should be sufficient to test the emotional linguistic relativity hypothesis with respect to resources such as words and metaphors. Overall, it seems that what is needed to progress on this question is interdisciplinary dialogue between linguists, psychologists, as well as anthropologists.
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