Structure of the Basque emotion lexicon

Abstract

Using a prototype approach to emotion concepts, two studies were conducted in the Basque Country, where an ancient non-Indo-European language is still spoken, to identify the mental state words that Basque speakers are most certain name emotions (emozioak) and to map the hierarchical and family resemblance structure of the most prototypical 124 emotion concepts. Cluster analysis of sorting data collected in the Basque Country revealed five basic level emotion categories similar to those found in American English and Indonesian (love, happiness, anger, sadness, and fear) as well as five other small positive emotion categories. All major categories found at the basic level contained several terms that are not traceable to Romance languages. Also in line with the American and Indonesian results, the basic level categories in Basque fell within two large superordinate categories: positive and negative emotions. Each of the five large basic level categories contained several subordinate level categories. The results suggest that the emotion lexicons, and corresponding conceptualisations of the emotion domain, in the Basque Country, Indonesia, and the US are similar, although there are some important differences.

Acknowledgments

This research was supported in part by a grant from the Research Bureau of the University of the Basque Country (UPV00218.230-H-13680/2001).

Notes

¹The description of the prototype method in this section is adapted from Shaver et al. (2001).

²However, some authors prefer other methods of comparing emotion concepts in different languages (e.g., Wierzbicka, 1984).

³An example of this problem occurs, in our opinion, in Heider's (1991) otherwise interesting and informative ethnographic book about the emotion concepts used by particular Indonesian subcultures. Heider collected words using a free-association technique, resulting, at least according to our criteria, in a mixed list of emotions and non-emotions. Other examples include hierarchical and circumplex studies conducted by Scherer and Wallbott (1994), Ortony et al. (1987), and Russell et al. (1989), who chose emotion terms based partly on pre-existing theories about what the resulting representational structures should look like. Whenever researchers do this, they risk creating self-fulfiling distinctions that are not necessarily representative of everyday language. As will be seen, we attempted to find a list of prototypical emotion concepts based on native speakers’ own judgements of appropriateness and prototypicality.

⁴A possible interpretation bias coming from an Anglo perspective was reduced in this study by having some researchers who were not fluent or able to think in English.

⁵Although it obviously would have been desirable to include only native Basque speakers who use nothing but Basque in daily life, this was not possible because all college-aged individuals in the Basque Country today are bilingual. The participants in both of our studies used Basque frequently, were studying in Basque, were attending a Basque university, listened to Basque radio stations, and so on. Many listened regularly to Basque music, read Basque publications, etc. They were as good informants about Basque emotion terms as we could realistically locate.

⁶This Spanish-Basque dictionary was used because it is considered to be one of the most comprehensive present-day dictionaries (even more comprehensive than most monolingual Basque dictionaries).

⁷Actually, the experts’ main task was just to delete the words that no one would consider an emotion name (e.g., umbrella, chair, book. …) so that participants were not burdened with a very long list.

⁸We chose a guided rather than an open-ended task because our goal was not to get a general picture of the terms most often used as emotion names, but rather we were interested in all the possible words considered to be names of emotions. When participants are asked to give spontaneous examples of any kind of words, the produced sample is always smaller in a free task than in a guided task like ours (which involves combing through a list to select examples of a category.) This is because a speaker's potential range of vocabulary is much more extensive than the actual lexicon that the speaker uses commonly, or can think of in a 15 min task.

⁹Multiple Basque words sometimes receive the same one-word English translation because they are closely synonymous or, in some cases, the Basque words have subtle nuances not captured in a brief English translation. The same thing would happen if a similar number of English words were translated into Basque; some would receive the same Basque translation. The brief translations we provided seem preferable to attempting to spell out a long English translation for each word.

¹⁰Men rated bakardadea, loneliness, higher than women, with the means being 2.29 and 1.82, respectively; t(102) = 2.10, p<.05. Men also rated gogobetetasuna, contentment, higher than women, with means of 2.24 and 1.77, respectively; t(91) = 2.15, p<.05. On average, these two words occupied the 100th and 108th positions in the list of 124, so neither was very prototypical.

¹¹We view likely pre-Roman words as native terms. Only Latin and other Romance-language words were considered as non-native in the present study because it is uncertain what the other sources of Basque words might have been (e.g., Celtic or German or Iberian). Many emotion words are compounds or derivates. For compounds, all of the elements had to be native words for a word to be considered native. For instance, we considered dolumin(a) a borrowed word because its first element, dolu, is of Roman origin, even though the second element, min, is a native word. And we considered bakardade(a) a native word because the base of the derivative bakar is a native word, although the ending is from Latin, -tate(m).

¹²The absence of native words in a subgroup does not necessarily mean that there has never been a native word to name that emotion. Sometimes a borrowed word, when introduced into a language, gradually replaces a native word with a similar meaning.