What Aneta Pavlenko discusses in this fascinating article is so widely researched, so cogently conceptualized and so richly reflected upon, that one feels like a spoilsport to bring up a debate which the author herself claims to have avoided, namely the “universalist/relativist debate about basic emotions”. If I do so in this Commentary, it is not to invalidate the large body of work in cross-cultural psychology and cross-cultural semantics that Pavlenko refers to, nor to put into question the wealth of data she and Jean-Marc Dewaele have collected through their international webquestionnaire, but to bring to the fore the dilemma in which any bilingual researcher of bilingualism finds herself.
On the one hand, an exploration of the psychological underpinnings of emotions in cross-cultural contexts leads the researcher quite naturally to gravitate towards the enormous body of research done in cross-cultural psychology and cross-cultural semantics. But most of this research has studied native speakers of language X and native speakers of language Y, not bi- and multilingual individuals. Furthermore, it has usually studied the language of small collectivities with homogeneous cultures. When it has studied national languages belonging to larger national cultures it has usually been before the recent global migrations and capital flows that have transformed the industrialized regions of the globe into multilingual and multicultural societies. It doesn't mean that national cultures don't exist any more, but they have become very often lieux de mémoire or public icons, self-perpetuated stereotypes or metaphors that speakers live by, but don't necessarily believe in nor embody.
On the other hand, any foray into the new area of language memoirs, bilinguals' testimonies, and translingual imaginations is bound to raise the question of a bilingual's social identity and cultural belonging, and to problematize any one-to-one mapping of language X onto culture X. Especially since bilinguals are often in situations of immigration, displacement, and diaspora, have lived out of their countries of origin for some time, and have experienced multiple other languages and cultures, the issue of relevance becomes exacerbated: Which social identity, which cultural belonging is relevant to the speaker at the moment of utterance within the flow of ongoing exchanges?
These complicating factors raise the following questions.
(i) To what extent can one assume that the concepts and emotionalities associated with emotion words, emotion-related and emotion-laden words in one language are shared by all speakers of that language? For example, is the lack of difference made by speakers of English between jealous (of a rival in an amorous situation) and envious (of another person's success) shared by all speakers of English around the world? When Russian speakers speak English, do they use jealous and envious to mean different things, or do they use jealous indiscriminately, like speakers of English? What about languages with international reach: Does the use of jealous for envious hold in American as well as in British and in European Continental English? Do speakers of Japanese who have lived for many years in Brazil have Brazilian or Japanese emotion concepts? What about Chinese speakers in Vietnam, New Zealand or Australia? Pavlenko's work on bidirectional transfer (Pavlenko & Jarvis Reference Pavlenko and Jarvis2002) seems to suggest that a Russian speaker is no longer a “Russian speaker” after a few years in the U.S., even though he/she is still a native speaker of the language.
(ii) To what extent are the emotion concepts and emotionalities associated with certain words in national language X shared by all members of national culture X? Consider the following statement: “exhibiting signs of one's dependence may be interpreted as a positive and desirable expression of amae . . . by the Japanese; the same behaviors may be perceived as shameful and childish among the Westerners or the Bedouins” (p. 151).
(iii) This statement seems to equate “speaker of language X” with “citizen of country X”, but there is no reason to believe that the cultural category “Japanese” or “Western” maps unproblematically onto any one national language.
(iv) To what extent are emotion concepts and emotionalities shared by members of subcultures Y and Z, characterized by social class, gender, geography, generation, bi- or trilingualism, rather than by national citizenship? Pavlenko's (Reference Pavlenko2006) plea is well taken that applied linguists should routinely consider as a variable in their studies whether their informants are mono-, bi-, or trilingual, but, like gender, social class and others, this category surely should be used only when it is relevant to the study at hand.
(v) What is the stable psychological reality of emotion concepts in speakers of language X? To what extent do learners of that language have to adopt permanent psychological states in order to speak the language appropriately, or is it only a matter of “thinking-for-speaking”? (Slobin, Reference Slobin, Gumperz and Levinson1996). Pavlenko states quite clearly: “a speaker of English learning German or Mandarin Chinese will need to learn to differentiate systematically between different kinds of anger; when learning Russian, they will need . . . to learn to speak of anger as an externally observable process and not only as inner state” (p. 152). This statement might lead readers to assume that the linguistic encoding of anger is equivalent to its psychological encoding. While that may be true of L1 speakers, who are socialized through language in childhood, for L2 and bilingual speakers who have learned the L2 later in life, the psychological and the linguistic might not overlap. Metaphors in the L2 might not be cognitive structures of the mind, but just nice idioms. Pavlenko accounts for these conceptual nonequivalences in a very convincing way, but her typology of conceptual processes in the bilingual lexicon leaves the reader wondering whether language learning in sequential bilinguals might be pegged not to a native speaker target, but, rather to some “third place” of their own creation (Kramsch Reference Kramsch1993). If that is the case, the fact that, for example, “learners of Russian are aware of the core meaning of the language-specific Russian emotion verb perezhivat'. . . but do not appeal to this verb in the narrative tasks where Russian monolinguals do”, would not suggest that “[they] have not yet formed a unified conceptual category [of perezhivat']” (p. 154) but that they are developing a bilingual conceptual category of their own.
(vi) Does the double mental lexicon of bilinguals contain a double set of concepts/emotionalities, or do most bilinguals speak in an L2 but feel in a L1, or over the years, if they have emigrated to culture 2, do they speak their L1 but feel like their L2? The excellent third section of Pavlenko's paper addresses this question through an examination of testimonies from the webquestionnaire survey. This section is the most promising of the whole paper, as it offers actual statements by bilinguals on their own emotionalities. An exhaustive treatment of this survey is offered in Pavlenko (Reference Pavlenko2006). Further research will have to examine to what extent the electronic medium used to conduct this survey influenced the nature of the e-mail responses obtained and the way they were interpreted, in the same way as the genre of a book, i.e., whether it is sold as literary fiction, autobiography, or chronicle, influences the way it is written and interpreted.
Aneta Pavlenko has single-handedly put emotions on the map of bilingualism research. That she has been able to do this is not only the result of her extensive scholarship and her ability to conduct research across various fields and disciplines in the social sciences. It is also due to her personal, passionate investment in the issue, and her bilingual sensitivity to the subtle shades of meaning expressed through different languages. In a country like the U.S. that lives under a fierce ideology of monolingualism (even though according to the 2000 census 40% of Americans speak a language other than English at home), such a project is admirable indeed. If she sometimes overdetermines the cultural indexicalities of words, it is surely due in part to the fact that, like Benjamin Whorf, she has to convince her American readership that in these English-speaking United States there is more conceptual and emotional diversity than many Americans would like to think (Schultz, Reference Schultz1990). If maintaining, learning or re-learning the language of one's ancestors entails not only acquiring the grammar and the vocabulary of immigrants to the U.S., but internalizing their ways of thinking and their emotion concepts, even though these might be quite different from those indexed by mainstream Anglo-American English, some might see a risk of fostering division in a country that prides itself of making e pluribus unum. The post-structuralist stance Pavlenko implicitly adopts by focusing not on emotions per se, but on their conceptualization through language, opens the door to considering the impact of other symbolic systems (e.g., visual, video, electronic, cinematic) on the emotional life of American citizens, i.e., their invisible, unspeakable and untranslatable memories of prior lives lived in different languages, the emotions that they experience on line or on the movie screen, and go on to verbalize in languages other that English.
Attributing emotion concepts in languages other than English to various national cultures existing beyond the borders of the United States does not disrupt the American monolingual ideal. Arguing that these concepts and their “foreign” provenance still remain in the foreign words spoken by 40% of the American population still leaves the English emotion concepts intact. The case becomes politically more controversial when the claim is made that American bilinguals understand and react emotionally to events differently when they read and hear about them in different languages, or even that the English they speak might conceptualize events and emotions differently from both monolingual English speakers and monolingual speakers of their other language. Questions of allegiance and loyalty can surface at any moment in the lives of bilinguals, especially in a country that is, for many, held together by the ideology of English. Aneta Pavlenko knows well the dangers of making such a claim. Her impeccable command of academic English enables her to make the case for emotions in multilingual speakers without having to say what she cannot say.
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What Aneta Pavlenko discusses in this fascinating article is so widely researched, so cogently conceptualized and so richly reflected upon, that one feels like a spoilsport to bring up a debate which the author herself claims to have avoided, namely the “universalist/relativist debate about basic emotions”. If I do so in this Commentary, it is not to invalidate the large body of work in cross-cultural psychology and cross-cultural semantics that Pavlenko refers to, nor to put into question the wealth of data she and Jean-Marc Dewaele have collected through their international webquestionnaire, but to bring to the fore the dilemma in which any bilingual researcher of bilingualism finds herself.
On the one hand, an exploration of the psychological underpinnings of emotions in cross-cultural contexts leads the researcher quite naturally to gravitate towards the enormous body of research done in cross-cultural psychology and cross-cultural semantics. But most of this research has studied native speakers of language X and native speakers of language Y, not bi- and multilingual individuals. Furthermore, it has usually studied the language of small collectivities with homogeneous cultures. When it has studied national languages belonging to larger national cultures it has usually been before the recent global migrations and capital flows that have transformed the industrialized regions of the globe into multilingual and multicultural societies. It doesn't mean that national cultures don't exist any more, but they have become very often lieux de mémoire or public icons, self-perpetuated stereotypes or metaphors that speakers live by, but don't necessarily believe in nor embody.
On the other hand, any foray into the new area of language memoirs, bilinguals' testimonies, and translingual imaginations is bound to raise the question of a bilingual's social identity and cultural belonging, and to problematize any one-to-one mapping of language X onto culture X. Especially since bilinguals are often in situations of immigration, displacement, and diaspora, have lived out of their countries of origin for some time, and have experienced multiple other languages and cultures, the issue of relevance becomes exacerbated: Which social identity, which cultural belonging is relevant to the speaker at the moment of utterance within the flow of ongoing exchanges?
These complicating factors raise the following questions.
(i) To what extent can one assume that the concepts and emotionalities associated with emotion words, emotion-related and emotion-laden words in one language are shared by all speakers of that language? For example, is the lack of difference made by speakers of English between jealous (of a rival in an amorous situation) and envious (of another person's success) shared by all speakers of English around the world? When Russian speakers speak English, do they use jealous and envious to mean different things, or do they use jealous indiscriminately, like speakers of English? What about languages with international reach: Does the use of jealous for envious hold in American as well as in British and in European Continental English? Do speakers of Japanese who have lived for many years in Brazil have Brazilian or Japanese emotion concepts? What about Chinese speakers in Vietnam, New Zealand or Australia? Pavlenko's work on bidirectional transfer (Pavlenko & Jarvis Reference Pavlenko and Jarvis2002) seems to suggest that a Russian speaker is no longer a “Russian speaker” after a few years in the U.S., even though he/she is still a native speaker of the language.
(ii) To what extent are the emotion concepts and emotionalities associated with certain words in national language X shared by all members of national culture X? Consider the following statement: “exhibiting signs of one's dependence may be interpreted as a positive and desirable expression of amae . . . by the Japanese; the same behaviors may be perceived as shameful and childish among the Westerners or the Bedouins” (p. 151).
(iii) This statement seems to equate “speaker of language X” with “citizen of country X”, but there is no reason to believe that the cultural category “Japanese” or “Western” maps unproblematically onto any one national language.
(iv) To what extent are emotion concepts and emotionalities shared by members of subcultures Y and Z, characterized by social class, gender, geography, generation, bi- or trilingualism, rather than by national citizenship? Pavlenko's (Reference Pavlenko2006) plea is well taken that applied linguists should routinely consider as a variable in their studies whether their informants are mono-, bi-, or trilingual, but, like gender, social class and others, this category surely should be used only when it is relevant to the study at hand.
(v) What is the stable psychological reality of emotion concepts in speakers of language X? To what extent do learners of that language have to adopt permanent psychological states in order to speak the language appropriately, or is it only a matter of “thinking-for-speaking”? (Slobin, Reference Slobin, Gumperz and Levinson1996). Pavlenko states quite clearly: “a speaker of English learning German or Mandarin Chinese will need to learn to differentiate systematically between different kinds of anger; when learning Russian, they will need . . . to learn to speak of anger as an externally observable process and not only as inner state” (p. 152). This statement might lead readers to assume that the linguistic encoding of anger is equivalent to its psychological encoding. While that may be true of L1 speakers, who are socialized through language in childhood, for L2 and bilingual speakers who have learned the L2 later in life, the psychological and the linguistic might not overlap. Metaphors in the L2 might not be cognitive structures of the mind, but just nice idioms. Pavlenko accounts for these conceptual nonequivalences in a very convincing way, but her typology of conceptual processes in the bilingual lexicon leaves the reader wondering whether language learning in sequential bilinguals might be pegged not to a native speaker target, but, rather to some “third place” of their own creation (Kramsch Reference Kramsch1993). If that is the case, the fact that, for example, “learners of Russian are aware of the core meaning of the language-specific Russian emotion verb perezhivat'. . . but do not appeal to this verb in the narrative tasks where Russian monolinguals do”, would not suggest that “[they] have not yet formed a unified conceptual category [of perezhivat']” (p. 154) but that they are developing a bilingual conceptual category of their own.
(vi) Does the double mental lexicon of bilinguals contain a double set of concepts/emotionalities, or do most bilinguals speak in an L2 but feel in a L1, or over the years, if they have emigrated to culture 2, do they speak their L1 but feel like their L2? The excellent third section of Pavlenko's paper addresses this question through an examination of testimonies from the webquestionnaire survey. This section is the most promising of the whole paper, as it offers actual statements by bilinguals on their own emotionalities. An exhaustive treatment of this survey is offered in Pavlenko (Reference Pavlenko2006). Further research will have to examine to what extent the electronic medium used to conduct this survey influenced the nature of the e-mail responses obtained and the way they were interpreted, in the same way as the genre of a book, i.e., whether it is sold as literary fiction, autobiography, or chronicle, influences the way it is written and interpreted.
Aneta Pavlenko has single-handedly put emotions on the map of bilingualism research. That she has been able to do this is not only the result of her extensive scholarship and her ability to conduct research across various fields and disciplines in the social sciences. It is also due to her personal, passionate investment in the issue, and her bilingual sensitivity to the subtle shades of meaning expressed through different languages. In a country like the U.S. that lives under a fierce ideology of monolingualism (even though according to the 2000 census 40% of Americans speak a language other than English at home), such a project is admirable indeed. If she sometimes overdetermines the cultural indexicalities of words, it is surely due in part to the fact that, like Benjamin Whorf, she has to convince her American readership that in these English-speaking United States there is more conceptual and emotional diversity than many Americans would like to think (Schultz, Reference Schultz1990). If maintaining, learning or re-learning the language of one's ancestors entails not only acquiring the grammar and the vocabulary of immigrants to the U.S., but internalizing their ways of thinking and their emotion concepts, even though these might be quite different from those indexed by mainstream Anglo-American English, some might see a risk of fostering division in a country that prides itself of making e pluribus unum. The post-structuralist stance Pavlenko implicitly adopts by focusing not on emotions per se, but on their conceptualization through language, opens the door to considering the impact of other symbolic systems (e.g., visual, video, electronic, cinematic) on the emotional life of American citizens, i.e., their invisible, unspeakable and untranslatable memories of prior lives lived in different languages, the emotions that they experience on line or on the movie screen, and go on to verbalize in languages other that English.
Attributing emotion concepts in languages other than English to various national cultures existing beyond the borders of the United States does not disrupt the American monolingual ideal. Arguing that these concepts and their “foreign” provenance still remain in the foreign words spoken by 40% of the American population still leaves the English emotion concepts intact. The case becomes politically more controversial when the claim is made that American bilinguals understand and react emotionally to events differently when they read and hear about them in different languages, or even that the English they speak might conceptualize events and emotions differently from both monolingual English speakers and monolingual speakers of their other language. Questions of allegiance and loyalty can surface at any moment in the lives of bilinguals, especially in a country that is, for many, held together by the ideology of English. Aneta Pavlenko knows well the dangers of making such a claim. Her impeccable command of academic English enables her to make the case for emotions in multilingual speakers without having to say what she cannot say.