Research over the past decades has demonstrated the explanatory power of emotions, feelings, motivations, moods, and other affective processes when trying to understand and predict how we think and behave. In this consensus article, we ask: has the increasingly recognized impact of affective phenomena ushered in a new era, the era of affectivism?
The relevance of emotion for language and linguistics is considered from three perspectives: (a) the conceptualization of emotions, (b) the expression of emotions and (c) the grounding of language. As to the conceptualization perspective, research on the emotional lexicon is discussed. Not only content words (N, V, A), but also prepositions are relevant (to long for, hate against). From the expression perspective, it is claimed that the expression of emotions takes place on all linguistic levels: phonological, morphological, lexical, syntactic, and on the level of figurative language use (metaphor and metonymy). 'Grounding' of language in emotion means that emotion is one of the preconditions for the functioning of language (emotion is part of the embodied grounding) and for its coming into existence, both ontogenetically and phylogenetically.
Conceptualization of emotions: Fluidity and relational propertiesWith nouns like love, anger, surprise, we can talk about emotions. But other parts of speech also contain words that pertain to emotions, in particular verbs (to love, hate, fear) and adjectives (happy, sad, angry). In what follows, we will have a look at nouns and verbs, leaving out adjectives, but we will add prepositions, as they
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