Emotsioonisõnad töises keskkonnas – millest kõnelevad loetelukatsete tulemused?
Emotion terms at work – what do the results of tasks of free listing reveal about?

Summary/Abstract: The paper focuses on a comparison of the results of tasks of free listing of emotion terms as carried out at work and at leisure. The working hypothesis was that the environment where the task is carried out could also influence the results, at least as far as the task involves listing emotion-related terms. As a result of semantic analysis of the elicited emotion terms and associatively related vocabulary it occurred, indeed, that the topicality of emotion knowledge varied according to the environment where the task was carried out. Presented and discussed are the results of two tasks – the task of listing one’s own current emotions during the task and the task of listing emotion-related verbs. It turned out that the main difference between the emotion terms elicited at the working place vs. at leisure lay in their evaluative value. Most of the terms listed at leisure referred to positive emotions, while terms elicited at work were both positive and negative. In addition, it was found that the participants had some difficulty in categorizing their current emotions by means of Estonian bi-valent emotion terms. In remarkably many cases the participants turned to lexis other than emotion terms to describe their current feelings. The task of listing emotion-related verbs revealed different topicality of phenomena related with emotions associatively and causally. At work it occurred that acts of verbal communication and intellectual actions were mentioned much more frequently, while at leisure it was rather physical actions, leisure and housework. A remarkably big part of the vocabulary referring to speech acts was evaluative by nature. The possible meaning of such asalient amount of evaluative communication emerging at the working place and its topicality for emotions was discussed by means of the theory of pragmatics. It was further hypothesized that emotionally relevant evaluative communication might be related to the hierarchical pattern of relations holding default in most working places. Thus, communication at work is hardly a pure exchange of information – this is what the tasks of free listing of emotion terms mostly revealed about.

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