ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the depth of the relationship between language and emotions. It aims to clarify some important distinctions and terms with respect to the linguistic encoding of emotions. Anthropological research has long confirmed that people in different human groups deal with emotional experience in different ways and different languages also offer very different means to talk about it. The chapter shows that emotional experience involves both some physiological and neurological mechanisms, which – for some of them – may be universal, as well as the cognitive organization of these mechanisms into experience, governed by culturally specific social and linguistic norms. A basic criterion that differentiates between descriptive and expressive linguistic resources is the semiotic status of the linguistic devices in question. Descriptive resources consist mostly of lexical resources, that is words, and some constructions.
