Case Study on Threat-related Intensifiers

Abstract

To date cultural influence on expression of emotion has been intensively explored in psychological but not as much in linguistic field Different cultures develop different emotion expression norms and people learn to regulate their emotion expressions based on the internalized norms (Matsumoto 2006) The present study probes into the Mandarin Chinese and Mexican Spanish emotive intensifiers making a cross linguistic comparison to find out how expression of feelings operates Threat-motivated emotive intensifiers in Mandarin Chinese and Mexican Spanish are the language focus of analysis Data retrieved from Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese (5 0) Chinese GigaWordCorpus second edition and El Corpus del Espa?ol del Siglo XXI (0 83) were first analyzed by the framework of Appraisal Theory (Martin & Rose 2007) and then examined by means of Natural Semantic Metalanguage (Goddard & Wierzbicka 2014) The results show that Mandarin Chinese significantly surpasses Mexican Spanish in the percentage of tokens signifying indirect display of feelings in four categories: implicit action judgment and appreciation These findings demonstrate an inclination that there is more inhibition regulation of expression of feelings in Mandarin Chinese than in Mexican Spanish In Mandarin Chinese the display of feelings is unobtrusive and wrapped in the implicit tokens and requires unpacking by the listener Sarcasm is another tool found in Mandarin Chinese data that assists speakers in expressing their negative evaluations through universally accepted emotion such as fear fright judgment and appreciation Moreover avoidance of first-person pronoun in intensifying constructions is more frequent in Mandarin Chinese than in Mexican Spanish

Date of Award	2020
Original language	English
Supervisor	Shelley Ching-yu Hsieh(Depner) (Supervisor)