Refine
Year of publication
- 2014 (3) (remove)
Document Type
- Article (3) (remove)
Has Fulltext
- yes (3)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (3)
Keywords
- Expressivität <Linguistik> (3) (remove)
The article focuses on linguistic means used by professionals when defining specific emotions in psychological texts. Based on a linguistic analysis of selected passages of text, the author describes the metaphorical concepts used in order to make it easier for recipients to understand phenomena whose perception is purely subjective. The role of metaphors in professional language is frequently neglected or underestimated.
The unique situation in which job seekers and employers find themselves results in the necessity to formulate and accept refusal letters. Employers frequently express their emotions in such letters. They are, however, in the form of clichés which apparently do not contain any genuine emotions. The subject of this analysis is genuine German refusal letters collected in the years between 2000 and 2012. Our objective is to indicate the types of emotions verbalized in the analyzed text type and to present the linguistic means utilized to express those emotions.
This study explored the organization of the semantic field and the conceptual structure of moving experiences by investigating German-language expressions referring to the emotional state of being moved. We used present and past participles of eight psychological verbs as primes in a free word-association task, as these grammatical forms place their conceptual focus on the eliciting situation and on the felt emotional state, respectively. By applying a taxonomy of basic knowledge types and computing the Cognitive Salience Index, we identified joy and sadness as key emotional ingredients of being moved, and significant life events and art experiences as main elicitors of this emotional state. Metric multidimensional scaling analyses of the semantic field revealed that the core terms designate a cluster of emotional states characterized by low degrees of arousal and slightly positive valence, the latter due to a nearly balanced representation of positive and negative elements in the conceptual structure of being moved.