Open AccessLinguistic Representation of Emotions in Japanese and Hungarian: Quantity and Abstractness
Author(s) -
Márton Szemerey
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
acta linguistica asiatica
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.114
H-Index - 2
ISSN - 2232-3317
DOI - 10.4312/ala.2.1.61-72
Subject(s) - expression (computer science) , representation (politics) , linguistics , relevance (law) , abstraction , psychology , emotional expression , cognitive psychology , computer science , philosophy , epistemology , political science , politics , law , programming language
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