Emotinal process as a multidimensional category: linguistic parameters of verbalization

Abstract

Emotional experience belongs to those domains of human existence that most clearly demonstrate the interdependence of the psychological, cognitive, and linguistic dimensions. Human beings do not merely undergo events; they evaluate them, relate them to their needs, expectations, and previous experience, and subsequently give them linguistic form. For this reason, contemporary linguistics benefits less from mechanically transferring psychological classifications into linguistic description than from identifying the parameters of an emotional process that become relevant in verbalization. Such a perspective makes it possible to regard speech as a space in which experience is not simply named, but conceptualized, structured, and endowed with communicative significance.