Lexical representation of the basic emotions in the Gothic language: Etymological aspect
Authors:   National Research Tomsk State University, Novitskaya Irina V. , Vorobeva Victoria V. ,   National Research Tomsk Polytechnic University
Published: December 2024

In recent decades, linguistic research has seen an expansion of the range of issues that address the relationship between emotions and language. The importance of studying the emotive vocabulary in languages of the world is proven by an increased interest in the analysis of various aspects of emotive vocabulary, also by the development of the history of emotion as an independent theoretical concept of modern linguistics. One of the areas of analysis is the study of emotive vocabulary in texts written in ancient languages from the point of view of its etymological, functional, stylistic and semantic characteristics. The study of ancient Germanic emotive vocabulary contributes to the reconstruction of fragments of a medieval person’s emotional picture, contributes to the systematization of linguistic means of representing emotions and clarification of the norms of socially prescribed emotional behavior in a particular linguistic culture.
The purpose of this article is to identify an inventory of the lexical and semantic group “basic emotions” in the Gothic language and to characterize their etymological links. The article is a case study of 119 lexical units, representing both the names of basic emotions and their manifestations as reactions in Gothic texts. The empirical material for analysis was formed using continuous sampling. The analysis of the language material was carried out using the methods of scientific description and generalization, the method of analyzing dictionary definitions, interpreting the results, and using the method of quantitative calculation.
In this article, the emotive vocabulary (i.e. emotives) is understood as a set of language units with differing structural and functional characteristics (lexical, phraseological, syntactic, morphological, textual), in the semantics of which emotions are reflected in different proportions. The inventory of emotion vocabulary includes lexical and phraseological emotive units that are capable of expressing emotional experiences independently, and emotive means of the phonetic, prosodic, morphological, syntactic levels, which are of an auxiliary nature. The article analyzes a group of emotive units of the first type. The emotive vocabulary of the Gothic language is a system of lexical means functionally aiming at the social coding of the emotional behavior accepted in the corresponding language community. The lexical units of the Gothic emotive vocabulary include direct representations of emotions, descriptions of emotional reactions through the symptomatology of their manifestation, and units that directly express emotions. The article analyzes the lexical units of the first two types, semantically representing basic emotions (according to K.E. Izard). The study of the Gothic emotive lexicon confirms the fact that all emotions of the basic level, namely, interest, joy, surprise, grief, anger, disgust, contempt, fear, shame and guilt are lexically designated in the language. The lexical-semantic group “basic emotions” is represented by nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, in quantitative terms unevenly distributed in segments related to different emotions. According to the collected data, such core emotions as joy (pleasure), anger (rage) and fear (horror) have been extensively represented in Gothic, for which more than ten designations have been identified. The analysis of representations of basic emotions in the Gothic language makes it possible to evaluate both the relative chronology pertinent to the entrance of the emotion words to the word stock and the adaptability of language means for conveying nonnative concepts in a translated text in the context of a social bilingual environment. In the overwhelming majority, the vocabulary of emotions is represented by derivatives based on the verbal or adjectival stems. Nouns denoting basic emotions in Gothic are represented by the lexemes of all three grammatical genders that belong to the declension types ending in either a vowel or a consonant, with a prevalence of feminine nouns. The morphemic structure of emotion words usually contains a word-forming suffixal element (a suffix per se or a stem-forming suffix of a “younger” origin). The most ancient layer of nominal designations of emotions includes neuter nouns of the declension types in -a and in -ja. Verbal representatives of the emotion vocabulary under consideration belong to different classes of the Gothic weak verbs; a few cases are examples of strong, preterite-present and reduplicating verbs. A written religious document in the Gothic language demonstrates the whole range of basic emotions that people could experience in the past, and why they experienced them, i.e. in connection with what situations, also in what form they felt them, what social practices generated a certain “code” of emotional manifestations.