An Emotions in Research Seminar presented by Gian Marco Farese

The "universality" of emotions remains an open question and is still a source of debate among reserachers from a number of different disciplines. It is often suggested that in spite of the evident cultural differences there are some emotions which are "basic", i.e. common to all people as human beings. From a linguistic perspective, the idea is that although an emotion is lexicalised differently in different languages, what is perceived by the experiencer is the same. Crucially, supporters of this idea use English emotion terms to claim the universality of a given emotion. 

However, evidence from different languages shows not only that different emotion terms denote different emotions, but also, and most importantly, that if a given language lacks an emotion term the speakers of that language do not experience the same emotion, because they cannot talk about or refer to it (as speakers of other languages which do have a term for that emotion).

Like all languages, English emotion terms denote English-specific emotions, which are rooted in the emotional sphere of Anglo culture and Anglo speakers and which do not have precise equivalents in other languages.

To show this, I examined the concept of haji in Japanese culture from the point of view of cultural semantics, which adopts the methodology of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage for analysing the meaning of words, including emotion terms. The analysis is aimed at showing that haji is an important cultural keyword in Japanese. The semantic explication which I propose captures various aspects of the meaning of this word emerging from proverbs, common sayings, electronic sources and literary material in extended context. At the same time, the concept of haji is compared with shame in English, with the aim of making the point that emotion terms are not universal but language-specific.