Getting ‘emotional’ in two languages: Bilinguals' verbal performance of affect in narratives of personal experience

Abstract

This article explores the cross-linguistic expression of affect by comparing how the same bilingual speaker displays affect in her two languages. I demonstrate how Linda, a French-Portuguese bilingual daughter of Portuguese migrants in France, performs affect differently in narratives of personal experience told in her two languages. I use three approaches to compare and analyze Linda's verbal expression of affect in French and Portuguese. (1) I look at Linda's own comments about how she performs affect differently in French and Portuguese. (2) I then relate her reported intuitions about her affect to her actual display of affect in each language. I do this by comparing the formally locatable speaker role perspectives (interlocutor, narrator, character) from which Linda recounts the same experience in French and Portuguese. She speaks more often as an interlocutor in French, and more as a narrator in Portuguese. She performs the voices of quoted characters in more extreme styles in French than in Portuguese. (3) Finally I present other bilingual listeners' perceptions from audio recordings of Linda's affective displays. Listeners reported that Linda's French performance was more forceful/intense than her Portuguese, and that she came across as a different kind of person. From these three approaches, I argue that it is not the structural differences of the two languages that account for these findings, but rather, the repertoire of personas to which this speaker has access in each language.