Emotions as a linguistic category: perception and expression of emotions by Spanish EFL students

ABSTRACT

The study assesses the extent to which Spanish students of English as a foreign language (EFL) at a B1+ level (CEFR) are able to communicate in English (target language) joy, sadness, fear, and anger emotions. It focuses on perception, by investigating learners’ ability to recognise these emotions in a reading task, and production, by examining the linguistic resources used to conceptualise and express them in a written task. The participants, 99 undergraduate students, completed an online English questionnaire, including 20 emotionally-loaded hypothetical situations arousing joy, fear, anger, or sadness, and a reading and a writing task. Emotion perception was analysed in terms of percentage of students’ agreement on identifying the main emotion in each scenario. As to production, emotion words, positive and negative emotion-laden words, expressive interjections, intensifiers, and syntactic devices were analysed to obtain common patterns of emotion conceptualisation and expression in English. The results revealed high percentages in students’ ability to perceive emotions, a bias towards positive scenarios, and different strategies of emotion expression, one of the most common across categories being the preference for the adjectival pattern when describing feelings.

KEYWORDS:

• English as a foreign language (EFL)
• basic emotions
• cultural content
• emotion perception
• emotion expression

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to the students who participated in the present study and special thanks to Gwyn Fox and the reviewers for the valuable comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Following Dewaele (2018), the term LX is understood as any additional language learnt after age three, that is, after the first language(s) (L1). The more specific terms: second, third, etc. (L2, L3) are used only when more specificity on a particular language is needed while explaining the findings across studies.

2 Excluded were the repeated emotion word types across the negative emotion categories (marked with an asterisk in Appendices B to E). The six fixed expressions, the adjective pissed off, and the verb freak out were omitted too due to their complex nature.

3 See Appendix L and M for information on the number of students who used an emotion word or an emotion-laden word within a specific frequency band.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the [Universidad de Salamanca] and [Grupo Santander] under grant [Ayudas para la Formación de Personal Investigador]; and [Junta de Castilla y León] under grant [SA150G18 Apoyo de los grupos de investigación reconocidos de universidades públicas de Castilla y León].