Titles published in the Second Series:

The Psychology of Facial Expression

0 521 496675 Hardback and 0 521 58796 4 Paperback

Edited by James A. Russell and Jose Miguel Fernandez-Dols

Emotions, the Social Bond, and Human Reality: Part/Whole Analysis 0 521 58491 4 Hardback and 0 521 58545 7 Paperback Thomas J. Scheff

Inter subjective Communication and Emotion in Early Ontogeny

0 521 622573 Hardback and 2 7351 0772 8 Hardback (France only)

Edited by Stein Br^ten

cambridge

UNIVERSITY PRESS

Editions de la Maison des Sciences de 1'Homme Paris

 

9 An illustration: "sadness" in English and in Russian

Like other so-called "emotion terms" (e.g. fear, joy, surprise, disgust, shame, and so on), the English word sadness has a meaning which purports to link a particular kind (or range) of feeling with a particular cognitive scenario. Typically, the feeling of "sadness" is triggered (according to the folk-psychology reflected in the word sad) by a combi­nation of thoughts which can be represented as follows:

Introduction: feelings, language, and cultures               39

(a)       I know: something bad happened

(b)       I don't want things like this to happen

(c)       I can't think now: "I will do something because of this"

(d)       I know that I can't do anything

For example, if I say that I feel sad because my dog died I mean (a) that something bad happened (my dog died); (b) that I don't want things like this to happen; and (c) that I am not planning to do anything because of this because (d) I realize I can't do anything about it. In addition, I imply that while I think those thoughts I feel something -something "bad".

This cognitive scenario (which is readily translatable into any other language) is presented in the meaning of this English word as typical rather than necessary, for one can say in English, for example, "I feel sad -1 don't know why" (cf. Johnson-Laird and Oatley 1989). What this shows is that by describing my feeling as "sadness" I would be saying, in effect, that I feel like a person does who actually thinks some such thoughts.

The full meaning of sadness can be presented as follows:

sadness (e.g. X feels sad)

(a)  X feels something

(b)                           sometimes a person thinks:

(c)                           "I know: something bad happened

(d)                           I don't want things like this to happen

(e)                           I can't think now: I will do something because of this

(f)                             I know that I can't do anything"

(g)                           because of this, this person feels something bad
(h) X feels something like this

This, then, is one of the cognitive scenarios "singled out" by the English lexicon and encoded in the word sad. Other languages single out other cognitive scenarios, and draw different conceptual distinc­tions.

While the explication of sadness proposed above includes a prototypi­cal scenario (shown here as the indented middle part), this type of prototypical scenario differs considerably from those proposed in cur­rent psychological literature, where no attempt is usually made to capture the invariant of a given "emotion concept", or to analyse this concept via simpler and more universal concepts. As an illustration of these differences in approach, I reproduce below (in a slightly abbrevi­ated form) the "prototype of sadness" proposed by Shaver et al. (1987:

 

40         Emotions across languages and cultures

The prototype of sadness

An undesirable outcome; getting what was not wanted ...

Discovering that one is powerless, helpless, impotent

Empathy with someone who is sad, hurt, etc.

Sitting or lying around; being inactive, lethargic, listless

Tired, rundown, low in energy; slow shuffling movements; slumped,

drooping posture

Withdrawing from social contact; talking little or not at all

Low, quiet, slow, monotonous voice; saying sad things

Frowning, not smiling; crying, tears, whimpering

Irritable, touchy, grouchy; moping, brooding, being moody

Negative outlook; thinking only about the negative side of things

Giving up; no longer trying to improve or control the situation

Blaming, criticizing oneself

Talking to someone about the sad feelings or events

Taking action, becoming active ... suppressing the negative feelings

A "prototypical scenario" of this kind includes lots of ideas which may come to mind in connection with the concept of "sadness", but it does not separate essential features from more or less accidental ones. For example, something like "an undesirable outcome" may indeed be a necessary part of the "sadness scenario", but "withdrawing from social contact" or "slumped, drooping posture" is not. (Listing various possible ways of behaving which may be associated with "sadness" is no substitute for defining sadness: on the contrary, in order to be able to say meaningfully that a sad person is likely to cry or to assume a slumped, drooping posture we must first be able to define sad indepen­dently.)

The NSM approach seeks above all to distinguish the essential from the optional, to capture the invariant, and to break complex concepts into maximally simple ones, relying exclusively on independently es­tablished conceptual primes and lexico-grammatical universals.

English-Russian dictionaries usually offer two Russian words as equivalents of the English word sad: grustnyj and petal'nyj (cf. e.g. Falla et al. 1992). The noun sadness is usually given two glosses: grust' and petal', although sometimes a third Russian word, toska, is also added (cf. e.g. Falla et al. 1992). This implies that grustnyj and grust' mean the same as petal'nyj and pecal' (as well as sad and sadness). In fact, however, this is not the case.

Both grust' and pecal' are common, everyday words in Russian (un­like, for example, melancholy in English). In fact, they are both much more common in Russian speech than sadness is in English. Toska, glossed sometimes as "sadness", also has an extremely high frequency in Russian speech (cf. Wierzbicka 1992a).

Although figures that can be found in frequency dictionaries are only broadly indicative (if only because they differ from one frequency

 

Introduction: feelings, language, and cultures

dictionary to another) the differences between the Russian and the English data are, nonetheless, too marked to be ignored. At the very least they show that neither petal' nor grust' is marginal in Russian speech, the way melancholy is marginal in English. They also show that Russian has three common everyday words (or families of words) in the domain in which English has only one.

Given, then, that both pecal' and grust' are conceptual categories of great salience in Russian culture, and that they both correspond, to some degree, to the English sadness, how exactly are they related to one another (and to sadness)!

If one asks native speakers of Russian what the difference between grust' and pecal' is, they usually reply, somewhat vaguely, that one of these emotions is "more concrete" than the other, or "more serious", "more definite", "more general", and so on. But a systematic study of the differences in collocations and grammatical frames of the two words and their derivational families allows us to capture the semantic differences in question in more precise terms.

To begin with, pecal' is much more readily described as "deep" than grust' is (glubokaja pecal', tglubokaja grust'). Similarly, the adjective pe­tal'nyj - in contrast to grustnyj - co-occurs readily with the adverb gluboko "deeply", as the following example illustrates:

Duxovnaja bezkrylost', bezdarnost' russkoj revolucii mozet dostav-Ijat' zloradnoe udovolstvie vsem ee vragam. No eto fakt gluboko pecal'nyj (*grustnyj) dlja russkogo naroda i ego buduscego. (Fedotov 1981[1938]:103)

"The spiritual squalor of the Russian revolution can be a source of Schadenfreude for its enemies. But it is a tragic [lit. deeply pecal'nyj] fact for the Russian nation and its future."

In the literature on human "emotions", the situation often adduced as the prototypical situation of "sadness" is that of one's child (or other beloved person) dying. In Russian, grust' (described by Uryson (1997: 442) as a "not deep and not very intensive feeling") would not be normally linked with such a situation. Petal' might; although given Russian cultural attitudes more dramatic emotions such as gore (grief/ sorrow) or ottajanie (despair) would probably be regarded as more natural.

Just as petal' is more readily described as "deep" (glubokaja) than grust', so grust' is more readily described as "light" (in weight) or "passing" than petal' (mimoletnaja grust', Imimoletnaja petal', legkaja grust', llegkaja petal'). This is consistent with the fact that an expression such as petalnoe lico (roughly, "a sad face") implies a permanent charac­teristic, whereas grustnoe lico ("a sad face") is more likely to refer to a passing emotion. It is also consistent with the fact that one can say

 

42         Emotions across languages and cultures

pogruzit'sja v petal' "to sink into petal" but not *pogruzit'sja v grust' (cf. Mostovaja 1998).

The adverb grustno can occur in the so-called dative construction, which indicates a purely subjective perspective (the feeling may be inexplicable, and not externally manifested); but the corresponding adverb pecal'no cannot occur in this construction:

Mne   grustno.

to-me   sad-ADV "I feel sad/⁷ *Mne pecal'no.

Grust', like sadness, may not have any clearly identified cause, but petal' is more similar in this respect to the English words sorrow and grief. One cannot feel sorrow, grief, or petal' without being aware of the cause of the feeling. The dative construction with the adverb grustno, on the other hand, is particularly suitable for referring to a feeling with no identifiable cause:

Emu     bylo   grustno,   on   sam         ne       znal   pocemu. to-him was    sad-ADV   he    (himself) didn't know why "He felt sad, he himself didn't know why."

This difference in the grammatical behaviour of the two alleged syn­onyms suggests that pecal' - but not grust' - is based on a conscious judgment: "this is bad". Grust' implies that one feels like a person who is making some such judgment, but petal' implies that one is actually making the judgment. The dative construction implies that the feeling is, as it were, involuntary and inexplicable, whereas pecal' implies that the feeling is due to a conscious and as it were intentional thought. Presumably, this is why the dative construction *mne petal'no ("I feel sad", literally, "to me it is sad") is unacceptable, whereas the corre­sponding version with grustno is perfectly natural.

Though the dative construction is particularly suited to the expres­sion of "vague sadness", the noun grust' can also refer to such a situation, whereas the noun petal' cannot.

On cuvstvoval kakuju-to grust', on sam ne znal pocemu. ?On cuvstvoval kakuju-to pecal', on sam ne znal pocemu. "He felt some sadness, he himself didn't know why."

While the Oxford Russian Dictionary (Falla et al. 1992) glosses sad as "grustnyj, pecal'nyj", the corresponding Russian nouns are glossed

 

Introduction: feelings, language, and cultures

differently: "grust' - sadness, melancholy", "petal' - grief, sorrow". These glosses are in keeping with the fact that melancholy needs no identifiable cause, whereas grief and sorrow do.

On the other hand, one might say that grief and sorrow are both "more personal" than petal': they refer to "something bad that happened to me", whereas petal' implies that "something bad happened" (not necessarily to me), and also, more generally, that what happened re­sults in a situation which is seen as "bad", too. In particular, the adjective pecal'nyj is frequently used to describe objective situations, and to imply a negative evaluation of such situations, as in the follow­ing examples:

vmeste s nimi sudili ix masinistku Veru Laskovu i Alekseja Dob-rovorskogo, sygravsego pecal'nuju (*grustnuju) rol' provokatora. (Amal'rik 1982: 41)

'Together with them, they put on trial their typist, Vera Laskova, and Aleksej Dobrovorski, who had played the pitiful (pecal'nuju) role of agent provocateur/'

Consider also the following line from a poem by Lermontov:

Pecal'no   ja   smotrju   na   eto   pokolenie. sadly        I     look-Is    on   this  generation "I look with sadness on this generation."

The phrase petal'no smotrju clearly implies an evaluation ("I think the state of this generation is bad"). The use of the adverb grustno would imply "a sad look" (i.e. a sad facial expression) rather than a negative evaluation.

The Oxford Russian Dictionary also cites the phrases petal'nyj konec "dismal end" and petal'nye resul'taty "unfortunate results". Although the dictionary assigns both petal'nyj and grustnyj a second meaning glossed as "grievous", no similar phrases are offered for grustnyj and the second sense of grustnyj is glossed in fact as "grievous, distressing", whereas the second sense of petal'nyj is glossed simply as "grievous" (without "distressing"). Though a little confusing, these choices are consistent with the idea that petal'nyj implies an objective evaluation, whereas grustnyj refers to a personal reaction to a situation.

All these considerations bring us to the following explications (the contrasting parts are shown in capitals):

petal'

(a)  X felt something because X thought something

(b)       sometimes a person thinks:

 

44         Emotions across languages and cultures

(c)                            "I know: something bad happened

(d)             this is bad

(e)                             I don't want things like this to happen

(f)                              I can't think now: I will do something because of this

(g)                            I know that I can't do anything"

(h)       because this person thinks this, this person feels some­thing bad (i) X felt something like this

(j)   BECAUSE X THOUGHT SOMETHING LIKE THIS

(K) X THOUGHT ABOUT IT FOR A LONG TIME

(L) X FELT SOMETHING BECAUSE OF THIS FOR A LONG TIME

grust'

(a)         X felt something

(b)        sometimes a person thinks:

(c)        "I know: something bad happened now
(d)

 

(e)         I don't want things like this to happen

(f)          I can't think now: I will do something because of this

(g)   I know that I can't do anything"

(h) because this person thinks this, this person feels some­thing FOR A SHORT TIME (i)   X felt something like this

The differences between the two explications can be summarized as follows.

First, the feeling of grust' is described only via a prototype ("X felt something like this"); no actual thoughts are attributed to the experien-cer. In the case of petal', however, a thought ("something bad hap­pened") is in fact attributed to him/her (component (j)). This difference accounts for the possibility of using grust', in contrast to petal', in the case of an unidentifiable cause.

Second, in the case of petal' the negative evaluation of the event ("something bad happened") is generalized and extended beyond this event as such: "this is bad" (component (d)).

Third, in the case of petal' the feeling (as well as the underlying thought) is portrayed as extended in time (components (k) and (1)). In the case of grust', time is left unspecified. This accounts for the fact that mimoletnaja grust' "a passing sadness" sounds better than Imimoletnaja petal' (cf. Uryson 1997).

Fourth, the feeling associated with grust' is not presented in the explication as a "bad feeling". Since the underlying thought (in the prototypical scenario) refers to a "bad" event ("something bad hap-

 

Introduction: feelings, language, and cultures

pened"), the explication invites the inference that the feeling caused by it is a "bad" feeling, but the explication does not state this explicitly. In the explication of petal', however, the feeling is specified as "bad" (component (h)). This difference accounts for the fact that grust' can be sometimes described as svetlaja "luminous", whereas petal' normally cannot (except in poetry).

Fifth, the triggering event is presented in the explication of grust' as current or recent ("now", component (c)), where no such reference to the present is included in the explication of petal'.

It will be clear from the foregoing discussion that while both grust' and petal' have a great deal in common with the English sadness, they both differ from it in some respects. Unlike sadness, petal' has to have a definite cause, it has to imply a negative evaluation of some event or state of affairs, as well as a "bad feeling", and it has to extend in time; and grust' differs from sadness in implying (prototypically at least) a short term feeling and not necessarily a "bad one". (The death of a child, frequently mentioned in the literature as a "prototypical anteced­ent" of "sadness", could hardly be linked with grust'.) Thus, each of the three words considered here (sadness, grust', petal') has its own distinct meaning. There is of course no reason to think that one of these words corresponds to some universal cognitive scenario (let alone a distinctive universal pattern of autonomic nervous system activity, cf. Ekman 1994b: 17), whereas the others do not.

It could be said that the differences between grust', petal', and sadness are relatively minor. As noted earlier, however, there are languages (like Tahitian; cf. Levy 1973) where the closest counterpart of sadness differs from it so much that the language can be said to have no counterpart of sadness at all (not even an approximate one). The main point of this section was not to claim that Russian, like Tahitian, "has no word for sadness", but rather to demonstrate the methodology which can be used for comparing any "emotion concepts", no matter how different, both within a given language and across languages and cultures.

 

 

This Page was last update: 6/21/2003; 12:03:30 PM
Copyright 2003 Muta Ceva
Theme Design by Bryan Bell