Emotions and Grammar
Originally uploaded by madbronny52
Once upon a time I was a philosopher. That time was even before electric typewriters, let alone cell phones and computers. One area of interest of mine was human emotions. Like others, I took my lead from William James who once asked “What is an emotion?” I will use James’s most famous example and I paraphrase, of course. It is natural for us to say we see a bear, fear it, and run. James said, to the contrary, that we see a bear and run, consequently we fear the bear. We run because we notice we are in danger and we are afraid of what will happen if we don’t.
To a philosopher it becomes important the way that James framed his response to the question: “what is an emotion?” It appears he thought of an emotion in terms of a sequence of events that starts due to some stimulus. The sequence ends with some feeling, a passionate feeling; a conscious emotional response. Years ago I was terribly bothered by the idea that this account made it appear that I had to introspect to know what my own feelings were. How would I know if I was feeling anxiety or whether I was feeling fear? Such questions can lead a philosopher to write and write and write. It can also lead to a little thinking, at first to repair James, and then to start from another place.
In periods of sanity, one can also learn something practical from thinking about the emotions. One can learn how a native speaker uses some grammar. An ESL teacher can construct lesson plans around emotions that may lead to some surprising results. Notice: “I was alarmed at his silence.” “She was very surprised at your invitation.” An emotional reaction to something often makes use of the preposition “at.” “Is she pleased with her gift?” “I was angry with him for being absent.” “With” often replaces “at” when what causes the reaction is a person or object rather than an event. There are other prepositions used with emotions of course, for example “resentful of” or “worried about” or “annoyed about.” The cause of an emotion is often expressed by a to-infinitive clause. “She was sorry to have missed the movie.” “He was delighted to see his students so happy.”
I noticed it was very common to use adverbs to express emotions: surprisingly, wisely, amazingly, luckily, etc. “Amazingly, she survived the operation.” (I was amazed.) Verbs such as like, love, hate, and prefer can be followed by a noun phrase object, by a to-infinitive clause, or by an “ing” clause. “She likes parties.” “She likes to give parties.” “She likes giving parties.”
There are a variety of other observations one can make about the grammar of emotions. There is a grammar about beliefs, information giving, and other human activities. I suggest emotions as one possibility only because it tends to be easier for some people to learn a second language closer to the way they learned their first language: indirectly. For others, a more direct approach may be the wiser choice. Prepositions are exceedingly difficult to learn because in other languages the work of prepositions are often done by inflection or they don’t match up well. For example, the English “to” becomes the German “zu.” However, “John is at home” becomes “Johann ist zu Hause.” The poor match-ups tend to make direct teaching difficult, but if the preposition is associated with some use of the emotions (only as an example), then I have found learning takes place a little more easily.
Native speakers tend to really confuse second language learners with subtle uses of prepositions. Do you say “…going to lunch,” “… going out to lunch.” Or “going out for lunch”? Second-language learners will invariably find native speakers using prepositions differently from the way their grammar text states that a preposition is used. So, for prepositions, I tend to find an indirect approach less confusing than approaching each preposition directly. Do you stand “in line” or “on line”? Here the answer may be a geographical one and how should we explain that to a second-language learner?
– Dr. Paul Schneider, Director of Teacher Education Programs, WAL
March 31st, 2009 at 10:23 am
In recent studies and blogging have found William James’s view of the sequence of events to provide unending insight and fascination. I think it stemmed from his recognition that human activity was a primary and intimately integral part of reality. Human action was not a response to reality - it was part of the creation of reality. So running from the bear acctually is intimately connected to the arising of fear. If you don’t run, perhaps you wouldn’t feel fear in the same way. Certainly if you didn’t run, it would be hard to tell from the outside if you were feeling fear. Thank you for this throughtful discussion.