The Sociopragmatics of Emotion unpacks the display and experience of human emotions in communication. Starting from the viewpoint that emotions are multidimensional, indeterminate, and situated, the volume is organized in three parts, discussing emotion in terms of three ‘touchstone concepts’ (19): evaluation, relationships, and morality.
The choice of the sociopragmatic approach to analyze emotions is justified with respect to its focus on the social, interactional, and normative aspects of language use (Haugh, Kádár, & Terkourafi Reference Haugh, Kádár, Terkourafi, Haugh, Kádár and Terkourafi2021), which accommodates the indeterminate, multidimensional, and situated nature of emotions and the need for interdisciplinary insights from the cognitive sciences, sociology, and linguistics. As the editors note, ‘emotion is a vital and decisive factor for researchers to understand not only the workings of human cognition, but also those of language, communication, and social interaction’ (17).
The first part on multidimensional evaluation unpacks commonly invoked emotions in terms of appraisal, attitude, and affect. In chapter 2, Laura Alba-Juez tackles the display strategies of emotions in the personal narratives of healthcare workers during the Covid-19 lockdown in Spain. Analyzing 333 instances from fifteen personal narratives (twelve written, three videotaped), she finds that invocation (implicit expression) of emotions is statistically dominant, realized through thirteen strategies ranging from provocation (more text-reliance) to evocation (less reliance), via sociopragmatic means such as framing, stance management, and moral values.
In chapter 3, Carmen Maíz-Arévalo and Francisco Yus investigate humor and irony communicated through online memes during the lockdown in Spain in 2020. A corpus analysis of 250 online memes reveals the prevalence of affiliative humor (a socially adaptive, positive type of humor that enhances relationships) and a preference for multimodal memes. The expression of affiliative humor contributes to the image of an isolated but bonded community, highlighting the mildly collectivist culture of contemporary Spanish society.
In chapter 4, Carmen Sancho Guinda focuses on the expression of empathy in a seemingly objective genre: technology descriptions. Analyzing 134 entries of technology descriptions multimodally, she identifies verbal, visual, and hybrid strategies used to express empathy. Verbal strategies operate at discursive and meta-discursive levels (e.g. reader-inclusive pronouns, slogan-like titles, ‘brand + detail’), while visual strategies include meta-discourse markers, argument illustrators, and emotional prompters (e.g. photographs). Hybrid strategies (text color, font, etc.) also serve to raise emotional engagement, suggesting a multimodal promo-emotional tendency in the genre.
The second part of the book deals with the application of emotions in relationship management. In chapter 5, Carolina Figueras Bates focuses on online mental-health support discourse. The study draws on 222 empathic comments from Reddit forums of anorexia (AN) and 272 from those of borderline personality disorder (BPD), identified via the perceptual-emotional verb to feel. Whereas in the AN community, physical feelings expressed by to feel replace the emotional ones, in the BPD community, use of to feel manages group relationships. These observations showcase how social-contextual elements shape responders’ behavior, underscoring the interrelation between emotion display and relationship management.
Chapters 6–8 shift the focus from mediated to simultaneous communication. Chapter 6 by Yongping Ran and Linlin Fan analyzes urging payment encounters between healthcare providers, caretakers, and patients. Using conversation analysis, the study unpacks how emotions are used in the rénqíng ‘heart’ work (e.g. evoking rénqíng ‘heart’ as mitigation, directly addressing rénqíng ‘heart’ threats, and so on) to mediate relationships between these parties, and in so doing, facilitate the fulfillment of transactional goals. Building upon these observations, the cultural roots of the rénqíng ‘heart’ work are discussed. From a cross-cultural angle, this chapter extends the classic ‘face’ metaphor to account for the role emotions play in the management of relationships in simultaneous communication.
Chapter 7 by Tatiana Larina offers contrastive accounts of emotions in the speech event of leave-taking. Drawing on supportive moves of leave-taking from 100 British (276 moves) and 100 Russian participants (176 moves) collected through discourse-completion tasks, the study analyzes their combinations, length, and styles, and finds that British leave-taking moves are more expressive of emotion, supporting claims that phatic politeness is common in British culture, which is attributed to a more individualist-oriented cultural basis.
Chapter 8 by Shelby R. Miller, Hilal Ergül, & Salvatore Attardo analyzes embarrassment in task collaboration via smiles and laughter, drawing on dyadic conversations from thirty-two participants in the US. Data are collected from a Tetris-like jigsaw puzzle task, followed by individual interviews and the MBTI personality inventory. Multimodal discourse analysis of twenty-eight embarrassment episodes finds that (i) non-verbal cues (gaze aversion, smiling) are prevalent, (ii) a social typology of self-induced, other-induced, and joint embarrassment can be proposed, (iii) self-absolving is a common exit strategy, and (iv) an inverse correlation exists between embarrassment and extraversion. The study concludes with a sociopragmatic conception of embarrassment as an interplay of face work, stance-taking, and alignment.
The third and last part of the book takes up the normative and social aspects of emotions, namely their morality. In chapter 9, Isolda E. Carranza analyzes the display of emotions in criminal courtrooms in Argentina. Focusing on five episodes of verbal exchanges using an ethnographically informed discourse analysis methodology, the study distinguishes between speech events of talking about basic emotions, emotion displays, and responding to emotion displays. Defendants’ and witnesses’ emotions are judged by the prosecutor with reference to the sociocultural expectations or moral norms applicable in this setting, and the display of the ‘right’ emotions enhances the social actors’ credibility. These observations showcase the moral foundations of emotions in institutional communication.
Chapter 10 by Wei-Lin Melody Chang & Michael Haugh shifts the focus to business interactions between insurance agents and clients. Based on six excerpts from verbal exchanges mainly in Taiwan Hokkien, the authors uncover a set of finely calibrated configurations of cues of embarrassment, for example, breakdowns in syntactic coherence, markers of disfluency, and so on. Displays of embarrassment involve a minimum of three moves of sequential social actions: an action that affords embarrassment (e.g. complaint, criticism), an embarrassment display, and dis-/attending to this display. In so doing, embarrassment as a social action ties together the (failure to meet) moral expectations, intersubjective displays, and maintenance of social relationships (or guanxi). More importantly, to fully appreciate how embarrassment functions as a social action, equal emphasis should be placed on how it is displayed and on responses to it in interaction.
Chapter 11 by Carmen Santamaría-García addresses the morality of anger by observing more closely its connection with taking offence. The study focuses on the role anger plays in taking offence in assistance calls to a British insurance company using an interactional sociolinguistic methodology. Analysis of two phone calls identifies three discursive strategies the customers use to take offence: failure to meet expectations (‘poor service’), hurt face sensitivities (‘I’m angry’), and failure to accomplish interactional wants due to unfairness (‘can’t cope anymore’). Among these strategies, hurt face sensitivities register the emotions of anger, upset, and so on, and the other two pose moral pressures on the service parties to resolve the complaints. This chapter shows that the expression of anger in taking offence is not simply a display of emotion, but also a discourse management strategy that puts together emotions and morality.
In the epilogue, Miriam A. Locher reiterates the tenets of sociopragmatics and the long, multidisciplinary tradition that the studies in this volume exhibit. She reviews the intertwined touchstone concepts and highlights the multimodal nature of emotion cues, concluding that the volume represents a socioculturally embedded and methodologically diverse attempt to identify and interpret emotions.
Indeed, methodological diversity, multimodality, and theoretical potential are the main strengths of this sociopragmatic account of emotions. The volume serves as a reminder of the ‘known unknowns’, or ‘dark matter’ of pragmatics (Levinson Reference Levinson2024): the difficult topics that need addressing consistently in future research. For instance, chapter 8 confronts the insufficiently studied multimodal cues (gaze shift, smile, laughter) used to convey embarrassment (Levinson Reference Levinson2024:11–13), a research gap which represents, according to Levinson, a multimodal ‘dark matter’ of neglected modality (Reference Levinson2024:35). Apart from multimodality, other types of ‘dark matter’ are also tapped into. Indirectness—the attribution of action in the tension between words and deeds (Levinson Reference Levinson2024:16–19)—is addressed in chapters 4, 5, 7, and 11, where (in)direct emotion displays guide the attribution of target actions to linguistic forms. Above all, the communication of emotions offers valuable inroads into the dark matters of pragmatics, and understanding the communication of emotions helps address the difficult topics raised by them.
More broadly, the studies in this volume begin to take a ‘look into the abyss’ of analytical difficulty. Emotions exemplify the analytical difficulty that pervades tacit aspects of human communication, which cannot be simply accounted for as form-to-meaning mappings, but are rather available as resources for meaning-making in interaction. Looked at from this perspective, the present volume showcases the potential of the sociopragmatic approach, and how the combination of interdisciplinary insights (Terkourafi Reference Terkourafi2021) and cross-cultural reflection (Ameka & Terkourafi Reference Ameka and Terkourafi2019; see especially chapters 3, 6, 7, and 11 of this volume) can help future explorations. The key questions, then, are how far a sociopragmatic approach can go towards accounting for the tacit aspects of human communication, including emotions, and more importantly, to what extent the social, interactional, and normative aspects of linguistic meaning can be captured in this approach. The present volume, without doubt, opens up more theoretical and methodological possibilities to grapple with these questions in future research.
