Emotional, evaluative, and ideological subjectification in Tagalog and Shona

Cross-linguistic studies of emotion language have explored the universality of emotion concepts (Koveces 1990; Wierzbicka 1999), the cultural specificity of emotion concepts (Wierzbicka 1999; Ning Yu 2009), and the sources of emotion in culturally specific discourse practices (Lutz 1988; Rosaldo 1990; Chen 2004). A few have investigated how emotions or feelings are expressed by certain kinds of grammatical constructions such as metaphors with predicate-base clause structure (Occhi 1999; Palmer and Brown 1998; Palmer, Bennett and Stacey 1999; and Palmer 2003b). This paper shows how grammatical constructions that express emotions and evaluations may arise from subjectification. We compare theories of subjectification proposed by Langacker (2000) and Traugott (2010), and we analyze examples from Shona and Tagalog. Our findings have led us to expand Langacker’s cognitive linguistic approach to include cultural scenarios and themes in the discourse ground. This new perspective has potential applications to the study of ideological communications.