A Summary

The purpose of this book was to take an interdisciplinary approach to an investigation of the highly complex nexus of language, culture and emotion in a multilingual setting with a special focus on verbalising emotions in the first language (L1) versus the second language (L2) (English). It aimed to enable a better understanding of the mechanisms and influences underlying emotion expression in LX (any language acquired after the first) users (Dewaele, 2017a) and the obstacles that people living with two or more languages face in this context, all the while taking a broad approach to the topic. Thus, my intention when writing the book was to give a profound understanding and overview of the field and, by doing so, I wanted to explain intercultural, individual and language-related differences in order to raise awareness regarding the effect of an additional language on verbalising emotions, and also on how it changes the perception of multilinguals themselves. In adding to improving our understanding of the L2 user (Cook, 1991, 2016), I hoped to contribute to avoiding or at least minimising potential risks of miscommunication and misinterpretation.

Additionally, the impact of the concept of ‘doing gender’ (West & Zimmerman, 1987, 2002) was investigated. By taking a dynamic approach to the study of language and gender, the aim was to analyse whether or not and if so, to what extent, societal norms and conventions have a gender-specific impact on the verbal expression of emotions, as earlier research has shown contradictory results so far.

Chapters 2–4 provided the reader with a profound understanding of terms and approaches central to the overall topic and gave an overview of previous research. This allowed two general research questions to be phrased, which were then refined into sub-questions and hypotheses in Chapter 5. These were tested and answered by drawing on the results of two studies combining a mixture of quantitative and qualitative analyses.