ABSTRACT
Human emotions constitute a primal language system in which emotional phonemes are strung together into sequences by implicit rules of syntax that communicate affect. If only by watching a soap opera with the sound turned off, the emotional language of a culture becomes immediately evident. It may be, as Ekman and associates have long argued (Ekman, 1973a, b, 1982, 1984; Ekman and Friesen, 1971; Ekman et al., 1972), that the syntax of the most primary emotions is universal, with perhaps certain refinements added by the emotion culture of society. But the key point is that individuals learn the emotional language of their culture, and they do so almost immediately out of the womb and long before they begin to learn the auditory language of their culture. This capacity for language, as Chomsky (1965, 1980) has argued for all these years, is innate; the human brain is pre-wired and receptive to learn language, at least until about the age of 11. After this point, language acquisition becomes much more difficult.
