Emotion and perception from typological perspectives

• Emotion and perception are expressed in every language, but their linguistic analysis is surprisingly sparse at typological level. In this paper, an initial attempt is made to describe typological characteristics of emotion and perception and form an initial classification. Verbal constructions expressing emotion and perception normally have a slightly different argument structure in comparison with other verbs. This is so, because emotion or perception happens spontaneously from a viewpoint of experiencer. Because of this, the middle voice is often used for this structure, and if not, the outer stimulus is realised as a grammatical subject and experiencer as an end point of stimulus. So structures like 'This likes to me' are common crosslinguistically. However, there are some variations, and once constructions are seen from historical perspectives, differences can be attributed to the change of alignment. In other words, emergence of accusative/ergative alignment, which assumes a higher degree of transitivity in grammar, altered structure. A historically older structure is sensitive to spontaneity, i.e. ‘This likes to me’ type, but newer ones form exceptions. So emotion and perception are closely connected to alignment change and development of transitivity.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

typology

transitivity

alignment

emotion

perception

Publikations- och innehållstyp

kon (ämneskategori)

ref (ämneskategori)