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The course should substantially broaden your perspective on the linguistic code, its processing and use. You’ll study the emotion system and you’ll learn to see how people use language not just for encoding and decoding propositions, but also to get things done in the physical and social world, and, as part of that, ‘move’ other people. After the course, you should have a deeper understanding of various important types of emotion-related language use, and of how they tie in with the ultra-sociality of our species.
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When you read or listen to a bit of language, you are somehow assigning meaning to an unfolding sequence of signs. Because of the representational and computational complexity involved, this process of interpretation is considered to be one of the major feats of human cognition. However, you also happen to be just another mammal, and as such you are biologically predisposed to have 'affective' or 'emotional' responses to the environment, that is, to feel certain things about agents, objects and events around you (including, above all, other people). In this course, we explore how these two acts of assigning meaning relate to one another, by connecting psycholinguistic thinking about language processing and representation with evolutionary views on Homo Sapiens as an intrinsically affective and ultra-social species. In the first part of the course, you will become acquainted with modern theories on emotion and related affective phenomena (moods, preferences), as well as with an analytical framework for thinking about the interfaces between emotion and language comprehension. In the second part, we’ll explore a number of concrete research topics where language and emotion are deeply intertwined, including verbal insults and swearwords, morally loaded language use, and the role of language in emotion regulation. During the second part, you will also be able to work on a topic of your choice. For example, affective semantics, sarcasm and affective prosody, indirectness and politeness, emoticons, gossiping and complaining. Note: Students who have participated in "De Gevoelige Communicator" should get in touch with the course coordinator before signing on to the current course.
Career orientation:
Because of the highly interdisciplinary nature of the topic (spanning linguistics, psycho/neurolinguistics, emotion science and research on sociality in various fields) you will experience what it is like to do interdisciplinary research
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