Linguistic Representation of Emotions in Japanese and Hungarian: Quantity and Abstractness

Abstract

In the present paper, two linguistic aspects of emotion expression are studied in the form they are performed in present day Japanese and Hungarian. After a brief summary on the recent emotional researches connected to Japanese culture and language, the concept of Linguistic Category Model is introduced. The quantitative study presented afterwards investigates emotion expression in terms of amount and abstraction. Translations were used for comparison and the results showed that 1) Japanese tend to use less explicit emotion terms compared to Hungarians and 2) emotion language in Japanese is characterized by the choice of less abstract phrases compared to Hungarian. These findings are discussed in the light of their relevance to former researches of cross-cultural psychology and linguistics. KeywordsEmotion; Emotion regulation; Linguistic Category Model; Linguistic Abstraction IzvlečekČlanek razpravlja o dveh lingvističnih vidikih čustvenih izrazov v japonščini in madžarščini. V uvodu avtor predstavi dosedanje raziskave s tega področja, ki zadevajo japonski jezik, in se osredotoči na t.i. Lingvistični kategorični model. V kvantitativni raziskavi spremlja pojavnost in abstrakcijo čustvenih izrazov -za primerjavo med jezikoma so uporabljeni prevodi -in rezultati so pokazali dvoje. Prvič, japonci v primerjavi z madžari uporabljajo manj abstraktne čustvene izraze, in drugič, čustveni jezik je v japonščini opisan z manj abstraktnimi frazami kot v madžarščini. Ugotovitve so na koncu analizirane v luči dosedanjih raziskav s področij psihologije in lingvistike. Ključne besedeČustva; ureditev čustvenih izrazov; Lingvistični kategorični model; lingvistična abstraktnost 62 Márton SZEMEREY

Translation Competence: Japanese and English Emotive Words With the Meaning “Surprise” (Linguacultural Analyze)

“…Japanese cultural scripts that govern the order in which emotions are expressed and understood(Wierzbicka, 1996), emotional inference (Uchida et al, 2009), and the co-occurrence of positive and negative emotions in Japan (Miyamoto, Uchida, Ellsworth, 2010; Uchida and Kitayma, 2009) 3. Recent research in word recognition has reported an interaction between the emotional quality of a word (characterized as positive, negative, or neutral) and frequency of occurrence (more or less common usage).…”