The language of emotions in Dalabon (northern Australia)
Creators: name: Ponsonnet, Mai{U0308}A
Publisher: name: The Australian National University
Year: 2013
Subjects: subject: Dalabon language.
subject: Emotive (Linguistics)
subject: Language and emotions

description: In this work, I document and analyze the linguistic devices available to the speakers of the Dalabon language to express or describe emotions. Dalabon is a severely endangered non-Pama-Nyungan of the Gunwinyguan family, spoken in south-western Arnhem Land. The first three chapters are introductory: Chapter 1 sets the theoretical framework; chapters 2 and 3 the ethnographic and linguistic backgrounds respectively. Chapter 4 presents expressive emotional devices, which include diminutives, interjections, and various prosodic features. Expressive features are prominent in terms of frequency, and relate to culturally central categories such as compassion. Nevertheless, descriptive emotional features also play an important part. The emotion lexicon is large: at least 160 emotional lexemes, most of them adjectives or verbs. A lot of them are morphologically compound, often involving a body-part. Having discussed the morphology and syntax of these lexemes in Chapter 5 and their semantics in Chapter 6, chapters 7 to 11 question the linguistic association between body-parts and emotions in Dalabon. Like most languages in the world (and like many Australian languages) Dalabon uses metaphors grounded in physical and physiological metonymies in order to describe emotions. The linguistic and conceptual status of these tropes is discussed in Chapter 7. Chapter 8 presents Dalabon emotion metonymies and metaphors related to the body. One of the particularities of Dalabon metaphors of emotions is that in spite of their metaphorical dimension, they remain partly metonymic to the extent that they always represent emotions as states or parts of the person, not as independent entities. As a result, emotions are never represented as forces or opponents. In Dalabon, a metaphor like 'overwhelmed by love' for instance, is impossible. Chapter 9 presents emotion metaphors that do not involve the body, in particular metaphors for anger. These metaphors come closer to representing emotions as independent entities - although such representations remain marginal. Chapter 10 adopts a complementary perspective on Dalabon emotional compound predicates, and shows that metonymies and metaphors are not the only things body-parts 'do' in the Dalabon emotion lexicon. Body-parts are also used to specify which part of the person is involved in an emotional behavior. For instance, it is possible to use a compound predicate to say that someone is 'angry from the hands', when someone is gesticulating in anger. Such compounds rely on analogy and compositionality, with metonymies and metaphors playing minor roles in their production. In fact, analogy and compositionality produce compounds which, in turn, may suggest new metaphors to the speakers. Chapter 11 elaborates upon the idea that purely formal linguistic features of a language may suggest new metaphors, or constrain the metaphors available to speakers. Seeking to explain why, in Dalabon, emotions are always represented as states or parts of the person rather than independent entities, I suggest that this may be due to syntactic properties of the language. Namely, the Dalabon preference for some subcategorization patterns, in particular experiencer subjects and body-part possessor raising, could play a constraining role with respect to emotion metaphors.