Languages of Sentiment

Working from Radcliffe-Brown’s landmark concept of social sentiments, anthropologists and linguists examine pragmatic and cognitive dimensions of emotion-language in several societies. Introductory and concluding chapters devote special attention to emotional consciousness. Chapters cover language primordialism in Tamil (Harold Schiffman), the erasure of lamentation in Bangla in favor of referential language praxis (James Wilce), women's discourse in Java that creates dignity by reframing the pain of humiliation (Laine Berman), speech styles signalling intimacy and remoteness in Japanese (Cynthia Dunn), divergent conceptions of love in Japanese and translated American romance novels (Janet Shibamoto-Smith), the syntax of emotion-mimetics in Japanese (Debra Occhi), the grammar of emotion-metaphors in Tagalog (Gary Palmer, Heather Bennett and Lester Stacey), and the lexical organization of emotions in the English and Spanish of second language learners (Howard Grabois). Zoltán Kövecses (with Palmer) examines the complementary relationship of social construction theory to the search for universals of emotional experience. (Series B)

C. Jason Throop, Department of Anthropology, UCLA in Journal of Consciousness Studies, Vol 8, no. 3, 2001:
[...] excellent examples of how it is possible to explore the rich complexity of 'emotion' without necessarily adopting an overly reductionist or determinist account.