What is Wrong with Getting Emotional? On the Adjective ‘EMOTIONAL’ in British English

This paper focuses on the connotative meaning of the English adjective EMOTIONAL through the analysis of dictionary entries in several contemporary dictionaries of British English and the data retrieved from the British National Corpus (BNC). The domain of emotions has been well researched in numerous interdisciplinary investigations focusing on the relationship between languages and cultures, including those in cognitive linguistics. Different researches of conceptual metaphors involving emotions have shown that emotions in English are predominantly conceptualised as negative and potentially dangerous phenomena. This paper attempts to show that this view of emotions in English can also be validated through the analysis we hereby propose. First, we discuss the cultural factors that contribute to the assumed negativity of emotions. Secondly, the dictionary entries for the lexeme EMOTIONAL are analysed, revealing the inherent bias against emotions despite the intended objectivity. Then, we analyse the collocations EMOTIONAL forms with nouns in order to determine their overall connotative value, and finally, we investigate example sentences for the neutral phrase emotional reaction retrieved from the corpus. All the results obtained consistently point to the fact that emotions are valued negatively in the English language and culture.

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC

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