The language of emotion

The Language of Emotions
The language of emotions has most often been studied as part of a larger subset of language, typically referred to as “internal state language.”

Some investigators have focused exclusively on the emotion lexicon or in the lexicon of desire (subset of volition and ability), feeling (positive and negative emotion), an metal state or other subsets.

These semantic subcategories are quite heterogenous and all findings must be interpreted in the context of the specific definitions used.

Many words of English which can refer to emotions or other internal states have multiple meanings, only some of which are relevant here.

For example, the word like may refer to an emotional state or a judgment of similarity; the word blue to an emotional state or a color; and the word can to ability/permission or to a container.

For this reason, observational studies of internal state language require careful examination of potential internal state words in context, and parental checklists require the specification of the relevant meaning.

Although the vocabulary of emotions and other internal states is extensive and distinctive these words have no distinctive grammatical correlate or pronunciation.

Thus this aspect of language is not specifically marked in any way for children, despite the very considerable challenge such words pose.

These words are relatively abstract: most of them do not have a clear, consistent, visible referent.

Even in those cases which do have a visible referent such as happy and mad, it is transitory an somewhat idiosyncratic across individuals.

Furthermore, the essence as well as the self. Such as act of categorization would appear to require a high degree of non-egocentrism, on the part of the child to infer an internal state for another.

Reassert in internal state language did not begin until relatively recently, in part because of the assumption that such non-egocentrism would not be reliably established until the concrete operational period i.e. the early school years.

Finally, the processes that have been posited to enable children to master an enourmous vocabulary in the preschool years have a little to offer in this area of learning.

For example, the taxonomic constraint has been proposed as a pre-existing bias to apply labels to categories of similar objects, and the principle of mutual exclusively has been proposed as a bias to assume that a new refers to a new object or set of objects. Neither appears to be particular relevant for internal state language.
The Language of Emotions