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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 115

Thematic Session (Papers belonging to this Thematic Session)

Discursive Construction of Emotion in Multilingual Interaction

Authors: Kasper, Gabriele; Prior, Matthew T.
Submitted by: Prior, Matthew T. (Arizona State University, United States of America)

Scholars across the social sciences increasingly attend to the contexts, representations, and consequences of emotion in everyday social life. In the wake of what some have called the “affective” or “emotional turn” (e.g., Clough & Halley, 2007), recent research on multilingualism has examined, inter alia,  how multilingual speakers perceive and categorize emotion in their different languages, their knowledge and use of emotion lexicons and figurative language, language choice in emotion narratives, and affective repertoires and styles (e.g., Dewaele, 2010; Koven 2004, 2006; Pavlenko, 2006). Predominantly this research has been conducted with surveys, interviews, narratives, and experiments, though rarely with natural interactional data.  These methodological choices reflect the standard Western view of emotion as intrapsychological states and traits that find expression through a person’s neurophysiological and social behavior.

An interactional sociolinguistics of multilingualism, however, needs to develop alternative or complementary perspectives on emotions as profoundly discursively and culturally constituted phenomena. This project invites us to revisit earlier sociological work, notably Goffman’s interactionally grounded face construct  (1967), and linguistic anthropology, showing how emotions are inseparable from a community’s cultural semiotics (e.g., Besnier, 1990; Lutz, 1988) and discursive practices (Ochs & Schieffelin, 1988). For more recent efforts to respecify emotion as socially-situated achievements rather than internal states or traits, we turn to ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, membership categorization analysis, discursive psychology, and interactional linguistics. Since these approaches have delivered critical epistemological and methodological resources to turn cognition (e.g., Molder & Potter, 2005) and identities (e.g., Benwell & Stokoe, 2006) from the inside out, they also supply the necessary – though not always sufficient – analytical stance and apparatus for developing a pragmatics of emotion in multilingual interaction. Based on natural data, studies of emotion in action have demonstrated how participants manage emotion through the sequential deployment of vocal and non-vocal semiotic resources; when and how such displays are occasioned; what actions they perform; what inferences they generate for the participants; and what interactional and moral consequences they engender (e.g., Couper-Kuhlen & Gülich, 2007; Edwards, 2007; Goodwin, 2007; Hepburn & Potter, 2007; Selting, 2010; Wilkinson & Kitzinger, 2006). 

However, the antecedent research has concerned itself almost exclusively with emotion talk among monolingual ‘native speakers’. In an effort to transcend the monolingual bias that dominates socio-psychological research on emotion in interaction, the thematic session extends existing socio-interactional research traditions to multilingual speakers, examining how participants from a range of cultural and linguistic backgrounds (co)construct emotion-implicative actions, identities, and stances through their sequential, rhetorical, and categorial work with multilingual and multimodal resources in ordinary conversation and institutional settings. 

The thematic session will address questions including:

- In natural interactions among multilingual participants, what occasions emotional displays? What interactional consequences and moral inferences do emotion displays engender?
- How do multilingual speakers display emotions through various semiotic resources, including prosody and non-vocal embodiment through gaze, gesture, facial expression, and body movement? 
- How are emotion displays achieved through specifically multilingual resources, such as codeswitching, crossing, and hybrid forms?  
- What types or clusters of semiotic resources index specific categories of emotion or emotional intensity?
- How are emotion displays implicated in accomplishing actions and identities? 
- How can methodological problems of recording, transcription, and representation in research on emotion talk among multilingual participants be addressed? What proof procedures are available for analytical claims? What analytical problems arise when the researcher shares or does not share membership with the participants?