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Passion, a forgotten feeling

Abstract

When contemporary sciences and humanities use the term emotion while discussing human mental-sentient dynamics, they usually don’t question its supposed status of a conceptual universal. Yet, despite its frequent usage, the term is surprisingly ambiguous, and its universality status is highly dubious. For instance, it shows not to be particularly adequate for the analysis of the Croatian Church Slavonic (acr. CCS) lexis that expresses phenomena linked to the human mental-sentient dynamics. Instead, this lexis seems to be in concordance with the concepts pertaining to the medieval paradigm relying on the Latin terms passio (Eng. equivalent: passion) and affectus (Eng. equivalent affect). The paradigm is articulated in the most interesting way by Thomas Aquinas (Summa theologiae, acr. ST Ia.IIae.22–48) and unfortunately almost forgotten or unwarrantably confounded with the paradigm of emotions.The third option in conceptualizing human mental-sentient dynamics (besides those that rely on emotions on one hand, and passions and affect on the other) argues that the concept FEEL is the most convincing universal candidate. Namely, the researchers of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (acr. NSM) hypothesis present substantial theoretical evidence and ample amounts of corroborating data from typologically different languages of the world that back up such a proposal. This paper benefits from this finding, since the word FEEL, and NSM in general, proved to be an adequate tool for delineating similarities and differences between concepts of ‘emotion’, Lat. ‘passio’ and Lat. ‘affectus’.

Abstract

When contemporary sciences and humanities use the term emotion while discussing human mental-sentient dynamics, they usually don’t question its supposed status of a conceptual universal. Yet, despite its frequent usage, the term is surprisingly ambiguous, and its universality status is highly dubious. For instance, it shows not to be particularly adequate for the analysis of the Croatian Church Slavonic (acr. CCS) lexis that expresses phenomena linked to the human mental-sentient dynamics. Instead, this lexis seems to be in concordance with the concepts pertaining to the medieval paradigm relying on the Latin terms passio (Eng. equivalent: passion) and affectus (Eng. equivalent affect). The paradigm is articulated in the most interesting way by Thomas Aquinas (Summa theologiae, acr. ST Ia.IIae.22–48) and unfortunately almost forgotten or unwarrantably confounded with the paradigm of emotions.The third option in conceptualizing human mental-sentient dynamics (besides those that rely on emotions on one hand, and passions and affect on the other) argues that the concept FEEL is the most convincing universal candidate. Namely, the researchers of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (acr. NSM) hypothesis present substantial theoretical evidence and ample amounts of corroborating data from typologically different languages of the world that back up such a proposal. This paper benefits from this finding, since the word FEEL, and NSM in general, proved to be an adequate tool for delineating similarities and differences between concepts of ‘emotion’, Lat. ‘passio’ and Lat. ‘affectus’.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Linguistic approaches to emotion in context 1
  4. Part I. Emotion, philosophy and language
  5. Emotions 21
  6. Passion, a forgotten feeling 39
  7. Part II. Expressing and interpreting emotion
  8. On “Disgust” 73
  9. A corpus-based construction of emotion verb scales 99
  10. Patterns of allocentric emotional expressions, a contrastive study* 113
  11. The expression of emotions in conditionals 137
  12. Conceptual metaphors of anger in popularized scientific texts 159
  13. Bad feelings in context 189
  14. Part III. Doing emotion
  15. Emotions and prosodic structure 215
  16. Prosody and emotion in Greek 231
  17. Cross-cultural perception of some Japanese politeness and impoliteness expressions* 251
  18. Part IV. Pragmatic use of emotion
  19. Verbal aggressiveness or cooperative support? 279
  20. ‘I must do everything to eliminate my negative attitude’ 309
  21. Language learning and making the mundane special 331
  22. Name index 347
  23. Subject index 355
Linguistic Approaches to Emotions in Context
This chapter is in the book Linguistic Approaches to Emotions in Context
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.241.04vuk

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Linguistic approaches to emotion in context 1
  4. Part I. Emotion, philosophy and language
  5. Emotions 21
  6. Passion, a forgotten feeling 39
  7. Part II. Expressing and interpreting emotion
  8. On “Disgust” 73
  9. A corpus-based construction of emotion verb scales 99
  10. Patterns of allocentric emotional expressions, a contrastive study* 113
  11. The expression of emotions in conditionals 137
  12. Conceptual metaphors of anger in popularized scientific texts 159
  13. Bad feelings in context 189
  14. Part III. Doing emotion
  15. Emotions and prosodic structure 215
  16. Prosody and emotion in Greek 231
  17. Cross-cultural perception of some Japanese politeness and impoliteness expressions* 251
  18. Part IV. Pragmatic use of emotion
  19. Verbal aggressiveness or cooperative support? 279
  20. ‘I must do everything to eliminate my negative attitude’ 309
  21. Language learning and making the mundane special 331
  22. Name index 347
  23. Subject index 355
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