VERDRUSS und ANGST. Sprachliche Expressivität im soziokulturellen Kontext
IRRITATION and FEAR. Linguistic Expressivity in a Socio-cultural Context

Summary/Abstract: The insights and findings of the neurosciences and cognitive sciences in particular have brought new momentum to emotion research. The hitherto underestimated social contexts of emotions have become the focus of research interest. From this perspective, emotions are understood as the result of sociocultural imprinting. They are subject to the control of culture, which is revealed in sociologically conventional, prototypical emotional behaviour and in a corresponding mode of expression. If one defines emotions as an inner human state, they are assigned to the area of responsibility of psychology in the traditional classification of science. However, it is increasingly being recognized that a purely psychological approach to emotionality is insufficient. Only the inclusion of the basic paradigms of other disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology, cultural studies and sociology, allows to grasp the complexity of this field of research. The article, which uses the inductive method, aims to identify the emotional schemata encoded in language, regulated in the course of socialization, containing the biological, mimic and behavioral interpretative signals, and to uncover the existing parallels in the manifestation of emotions IRRITATION and FEAR in German and Polish. The focus of the corpus-based analysis is on the semantic possibilities of reaction patterns that are distinctive for the emotions under investigation. In the paper, the phraseological units from the denotative domains IRRITATION and FEAR are discussed in relation to their sociocultural motivation. In doing so, both the supra-singular, in that phraseologisms of an international character are dealt with, and the singular, which is illustrated by means of the singular language-specific phrases, are expressed. The article is intended as a contribution to the discourse on the interdisciplinary approach to emotion research.

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