EmoCNet

Conceptual network of the linguistic expression of emotions and affective states (EmoCNET) is a project which includes scholars from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and Informatics Department of the University of Rijeka. The project’s goal is to develop network representations of the linguistic expression of emotions and affective states using cognitive linguistics analysis, corpus methods, data mining, network theory and visualization software. The idea is based on the application of the embodied cognition theory and cognitive grammar that explains the embodied grounding of the intersubjective expression of subjective states, such as emotion and affect. The activation of the affective content in communication is achieved by mental simulation of the salient features of the emotion concepts. The componential emotion theory (Scherer 2003; Fontaine, Scherer and Soriano 2013) explains that the variety of these componential features is defined by a multidimensional embodied dynamic process of activation bodily reactions, expressive behavior, action tendencies, appraisal, and feeling states that occur as a response to the specific events in the environment with the aim of quickly preparing the organism for optimal reaction. The idea is to search for the linguistic expressions of these mental simulations and to represent these linguistic constructions as a conceptual representation of emotion networks. In this way, the network representations will serve as a repository of cognitive models of conceptualizing emotions and salient linguistic constructions that facilitate the activation of affect in Croatian language. The project aims to develop several models of visualization, each with its distinctive function for interpretation of the usage of cognitive models, intra-cultural and cross-cultural comparison. These models will be published online and will provide several interactive functions. In the humanities and social sciences such dimension of analysis could be valuable in many areas that deal with expression of emotions in culture and pragmatic implications of the affective states on the activation of behavioural tendencies. For the natural science, and especially neural sciences, this research wold be beneficial in terms of visualizing the cognitive entrenchment. Such emotional conceptual networks, according to the neural theory of language (Lakoff 2008) can be associated with the neural processes that occur during the affective arousal and cognitive appraisal of the emotion event.
on August 10, 2016 |
at 09:50

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