Skip to main content
Presented to you through Paradigm Publishing Services

John Benjamins Publishing Company

Visit our Partner Page See all our books
Chapter
Licensed
Unlicensed Requires Authentication

Feeling for speaking

How expressive body movements ground verbal descriptions of emotions
  • and

Abstract

In this paper, attention is drawn to the embodied experiences that are mobilized when speakers are asked to describe emotions. By analyzing how people use expressive body movements and language when thinking and speaking about emotion concepts, light is thrown on “People’s subjective, felt experiences of their bodies in action” (Gibbs, 2005: 9). It illustrates how experiencing emotion concepts bodily provides “part of the fundamental grounding for language and thought.” (Gibbs, 2005: 9). The title of this chapter alludes to Daniel I. Slobin’s reformulation of the linguistic relativity hypothesis. Slobin counters Wilhelm von Humboldt and Benjamin L. Whorf static understanding of the relationship between “thought and language” with a dynamic idea of this relation which he terms Thinking for speaking (Slobin, 1996: 76). We report a small study indicating that speakers not only express affective experiences as conceptual content, but perform or indicate expressive body movements before or while describing a specific emotion. The chapter thus suggests a very concrete way of understanding Gibbs’ assumption of an “embodiment premise for language and thought”.

Abstract

In this paper, attention is drawn to the embodied experiences that are mobilized when speakers are asked to describe emotions. By analyzing how people use expressive body movements and language when thinking and speaking about emotion concepts, light is thrown on “People’s subjective, felt experiences of their bodies in action” (Gibbs, 2005: 9). It illustrates how experiencing emotion concepts bodily provides “part of the fundamental grounding for language and thought.” (Gibbs, 2005: 9). The title of this chapter alludes to Daniel I. Slobin’s reformulation of the linguistic relativity hypothesis. Slobin counters Wilhelm von Humboldt and Benjamin L. Whorf static understanding of the relationship between “thought and language” with a dynamic idea of this relation which he terms Thinking for speaking (Slobin, 1996: 76). We report a small study indicating that speakers not only express affective experiences as conceptual content, but perform or indicate expressive body movements before or while describing a specific emotion. The chapter thus suggests a very concrete way of understanding Gibbs’ assumption of an “embodiment premise for language and thought”.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Art: My Dancing Mind vii
  4. Prologue 1
  5. Introduction 11
  6. Part I. New windows into cognition and communication
  7. Metaphor in The Cancer Poetry Project 31
  8. Narrative experiences of metaphor 45
  9. Researching embodied metaphor production through improvisational dance practice 63
  10. Feeling for speaking 77
  11. Multimodal body, multimodal mind, multimodal communication 95
  12. Fictive motion in the wild 109
  13. Part II. Account expansion, flexibility, or integration
  14. Extended CMT and the dynamic systems theory of metaphor 131
  15. Communication, comprehension, and interpretation 143
  16. Between embodiment and usage 157
  17. Metaphors and meaning-making in young people’s talk about climate change 191
  18. Experiential viewpoint, simile and dynamicity in discourse 205
  19. Metaphor and elaboration in context 223
  20. Part III. Influencers and drivers
  21. Figurativity 243
  22. Conceptual blending and memes 265
  23. How to talk about motion without verbs 293
  24. Defaultness vs. constructionism 305
  25. Relevance theory perspectives on web-mediated communication 325
  26. Language happens 341
  27. Index 357
Dynamism in Metaphor and Beyond
This chapter is in the book Dynamism in Metaphor and Beyond
https://doi.org/10.1075/milcc.9.04mul

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Art: My Dancing Mind vii
  4. Prologue 1
  5. Introduction 11
  6. Part I. New windows into cognition and communication
  7. Metaphor in The Cancer Poetry Project 31
  8. Narrative experiences of metaphor 45
  9. Researching embodied metaphor production through improvisational dance practice 63
  10. Feeling for speaking 77
  11. Multimodal body, multimodal mind, multimodal communication 95
  12. Fictive motion in the wild 109
  13. Part II. Account expansion, flexibility, or integration
  14. Extended CMT and the dynamic systems theory of metaphor 131
  15. Communication, comprehension, and interpretation 143
  16. Between embodiment and usage 157
  17. Metaphors and meaning-making in young people’s talk about climate change 191
  18. Experiential viewpoint, simile and dynamicity in discourse 205
  19. Metaphor and elaboration in context 223
  20. Part III. Influencers and drivers
  21. Figurativity 243
  22. Conceptual blending and memes 265
  23. How to talk about motion without verbs 293
  24. Defaultness vs. constructionism 305
  25. Relevance theory perspectives on web-mediated communication 325
  26. Language happens 341
  27. Index 357
Downloaded on 30.4.2026 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1075/milcc.9.04mul/html?lang=en
Scroll to top button