Anna Wierzbicka

It is widely believed that there are some emotions which are universally associated with distinctive facial expressions and that one can recognize, universally, an angry face, a happy face, a sad face, and so on. The "basic emotions " are believed to be part of the biological makeup of human species and to be therefore "hardwired". In contrast to this view, Or tony and Turner have suggested that it is not emotions but some components of emotions which are universally linked with certain facial expressions, or rather with some components of facial expressions. Ortony and Turner have made a good case for this hypothesis. But the theory will be more convincing - and indeed more verifiable - if the postulated "dissociable components of emotions" are formulated in a rigorous, and culture-independent manner. The paper argues that the Natural Semantic Metalanguage, based on universal semantic primitives and devised by the author and colleagues, provides a suitable culture-independent framework.

“It is a noble task to try to understand others, and to have them understand you but it is never an easy one”, says Everett. This paper argues that a basic prerequisite for understanding others is to have some shared concepts on which this understanding can build. If speakers of different languages didn’t share some concepts to begin with then cross-cultural understanding would not be possible even with the best of will on all sides. Current Anthropology For example, Everett claims that Pirahã has no word for “mother”, no words for “before’ and “after”, no words for “one”, “two” and “all” and no words comparable to ‘think” and “want”. These claims are based, I believe, on faulty semantic analysis, and in particular, on a determination not to recognize polysemy under any circumstances. As I see it, at many points this stance makes nonsense of Everett’s own data and distorts the conceptual world of the Pirahã. Since he does not want to recognize the existence of any shared concepts, Everett is also not prepared to address the question of a culture-neutral metalanguage in which Pirahã and English conceptual categories could be compared. This often leads him to imposing cultural categories of English on the conceptual world of the Pirahã. The result is a combination of exoticism and Anglocentrism which doesn’t do justice to Everett’s long and intimate engagement with the Pirahã people and their language. Sadly, it blinds him to what Franz Boas called “the psychic unity of mankind”, reflected in the common semantic features of human languages and fully compatible with the cultural shaping of their lexicons and grammars.

Since English is not a neutral scientific language for the description of emotions (or anything else), then the key question is what (meta)language other than English can be used instead. I draw a distinction between “experiential meaning” which can only be acquired through lived experience, and “compositional meaning” which can be adequately portrayed in the mini-language of universal human concepts (NSM) developed through wide-ranging cross-linguistic investigations. The article rejects both the anglocentrism of emotion studies which take English concepts for granted and the “zoocentrism” which seeks to reduce human emotions to “mammalian responses,” behavioral patterns or neuro-physiological states. It argues that any discourse on emotions not anchored in universal human concepts is inherently ethnocentric (more often than not, anglocentric)

This paper points out that a major shift of paradigm is currently going on in the study of the human face and it seeks to articulate and to develop the fundamental assumptions underlying this shift. The main theses of the paper are: 1) Facial expressions can convey meanings comparable to the meanings of verbal utterances. 2) Semantic analysis must distinguish between the context-independent invariant and its contextual interpretations. 3) Certain components of facial behavior do have constant context-independent meanings. 4) The meanings of facial components and configurations of components have an inherent first-person and present tense orientation. 5) The basis for the interpretation of facial gestures is, above all, experiential. 6) The meanings of some facial expressions are universally intelligible and can be interpreted without reference to any local conventions. 7) To be fruitful, the semantic analysis of facial expressions needs a methodology. This can be derived from the methodological experience of linguistic semantics. The author illustrates and supports these theses by analyzing a range of universally interpretable facial expressions such as the following ones: “brow furrowed” ; eyebrows raised; eyes wide open; corners of the mouth raised; corners of the mouth lowered; mouth open ; lips pressed together; upper lip and nose “raised”.

Building on the author's earlier work, this paper argues that language is a key issue in understanding human emotions and that treating English emotion terms as valid analytical tools continues to be a roadblock in the study of emotions. Further, it shows how the methodology developed by the author and colleagues, known as NSM (from Natural Semantic Metalanguage), allows us to break free of the “shackles” (Barrett, 2006) of English psychological terms and explore human emotions from a culture-independent perspective. The use of NSM makes it possible to study human emotions from a genuinely cross-linguistic and cross-cultural, as well as a psychological, perspective and thus “opens up new possibilities for the scientific understanding of subjectivity and psychological experience” (Goddard, 2007)