Emotional language: A brief history of recent research

The world’s languages offer myriads of different ways to talk about emotions, and this variation has been an object of study in anthropological linguistics for a long time. This chapter begins by recounting how this interest in the language of emotions emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, initially led by anthropologists who did not study language in and of itself. As presented in the second section, their work nevertheless led them to articulate a core question about language per se: how does it produce or transform emotions? In the last section, I review the multiple perspectives adopted by linguists – other than anthropological linguists– to examine emotional language, ranging from the description of words in individual languages to comparisons across languages, and the holistic study of speech and conversation. Along the way, I will highlight the strengths and weaknesses of research on emotional language, suggesting ways forward where possible. Overall, after five decades of remarkable progress in empirical description, the most salient challenge seems to be synthesis and the articulation and structuring of research questions.