Russian Emotion Vocabulary in American Learners’ Narratives

Abstract

This study compared the uses of emotion vocabulary in narratives elicited from monolingual speakers of Russian and English and advanced American learners of Russian. Monolingual speakers differed significantly in the distribution of emotion terms across morphosyntactic categories: English speakers favored an adjectival pattern of emotion description, and Russian speakers a verbal one. Advanced American learners of Russian shifted from the adjectival to the verbal pattern in Russian and thus began approximating the usage of native speakers of Russian. At the same time, the data revealed 6 areas where learner usage differed from the monolingual Russian corpus: morphosyntactic transfer from the first language (L1), semantic transfer from the L1, greater use of adverbial constructions, absence of a language-specific verb frequently used by native Russian speakers, violations of appropriateness of sociolinguistic register, and a significantly lower proportion of emotion word tokens.

The emotional weight of I love you in multilinguals’ languages

“…Toya and Kodis, 1996). Mougeon et al's (2002) observation that French Canadian course books destined for English learners present a very narrow view of the TL is echoed in Pavlenko and Driagina's (2007) study on Russian course books for English learners:…”

“…Memories are tagged by language and the emotional tone of the experience is encoded as well. Building on Pavlenko's (2002a,b) finding that Russian-English bilinguals transfer the adjectival pattern from L2 English into L1 Russian to express emotion, Pavlenko and Driagina (2007) found that in the process of L2 acquisition advanced American learners of Russian shift the pattern of structural choices, replacing the preference for adjectives to describe emotional states with that for emotion verbs.…”

“…A number of researchers (Marian and Kaushanskaya, 2004;Pavlenko, 2002a,b;Rintell, 1990) have therefore focused on stretches of multilinguals' emotion discourse looking more specifically at how emotion and emotion-laden words, expressions, and metaphors are deployed in various forms of discourse. These include personal narratives, oral interaction and written texts (Pavlenko and Driagina, 2007). Rintell (1990) analyzed personal experience narratives about emotional events from six native speakers of English and eight intermediate English Second Language students.…”

Reconstructing verb meaning in a second language

“…Learners commonly over-generalise ser and use it more correctly than estar even at advanced levels (e.g., Geeslin, 2003, andpapers in Guijarro-Fuentes &Geeslin, 2008). Similarly, English learners of L2 Russian have been found not to distinguish serdit'sia (to be experiencing anger, to be actively cross, angry, mad at someone in particular) and zlit'sia (to be experiencing anger in general) but to over-generalise the first term (Pavlenko & Driagina, 2007). Overgeneralisation and simplification in the form of avoidance seem to result from such transitions (e.g., Viberg, 1998 …”

Yabancı Dilde Duygusal Dil Algısı, İfade Edilmesi ve Dil Eğitimindeki Önemi

“…Elde edilen bulgulara göre, farklı dillerdeki sözcüklerin kavramsal olarak ne kadar örtüştüğünün dil eğitiminde önemli bir yer tuttuğu ve yabancı dil sınıflarında bu örtüşmenin boyutu ile ilgili bir farkındalık yaratılması gerektiği vurgulanmıştır. Pavlenko ve Driagina (2007) da, aynı yöntemin kullanıldığı bir başka çalışmada, farklı dillerdeki duygu sözcüklerinin kavramsal açıdan farklı olmalarının dil öğrenen bireyler için zorluk teşkil ettiğini bildirmişlerdir. Benzer bir konuyu araştıran deneysel bir çalışmada ise Segalowitz vd.…”