Emotions as a linguistic category: perception and expression of emotions by Spanish EFL students

摘要

The study assesses the extent to which Spanish students of English as a foreign language (EFL) at a B1+ level (CEFR) are able to communicate in English (target language) joy, sadness, fear, and anger emotions. It focuses on perception, by investigating learners' ability to recognise these emotions in a reading task, and production, by examining the linguistic resources used to conceptualise and express them in a written task. The participants, 99 undergraduate students, completed an online English questionnaire, including 20 emotionally-loaded hypothetical situations arousing joy, fear, anger, or sadness, and a reading and a writing task. Emotion perception was analysed in terms of percentage of students' agreement on identifying the main emotion in each scenario. As to production, emotion words, positive and negative emotion-laden words, expressive interjections, intensifiers, and syntactic devices were analysed to obtain common patterns of emotion conceptualisation and expression in English. The results revealed high percentages in students' ability to perceive emotions, a bias towards positive scenarios, and different strategies of emotion expression, one of the most common across categories being the preference for the adjectival pattern when describing feelings.