Il relativismo lingustico e la traducibilità del lessico emozionale

Emotion words communicate culturally held understandings about experiences, values, and goals. Cross-cultural differences in emotion concepts are well-established (e.g., Russell, 1991; Wierzbicka, 1994) and purportedly ‘untranslatable’ emotion words are particularly salient examples of this phenomenon: Tagalog speakers have a word, “gigil”, for “when something is so cute that you want to squeeze it”; second language learners of Dutch have a difficult time appreciating the nuances of “gezelligheid”; and Italian does not have an easy translation for English “excitement”. Our aim is to re-evaluate the notion of translatability of emotion words in the light of the linguistic relativity approach and of the newest frontiers opened by psychological constructivism: language plays a role in shaping our perception of the emotional states and in structuring our emotional concepts (e.g., Lindquist et al, 2015; Lindquist, 2017). Emotion words are a window on the organization and structure of emotional experience of each particular natural-language; even words generally considered as equivalent translations often show different categorizations of the external (and internal) reality (Hurtado de Mendoza et al., 2010). In order to assess the translatability of emotion words and shed light on their cognitive role, we reconsider the notion of language system put forward by the Saussurian tradition and we introduce a new method aimed at determining and describing the behavior of linguistic units within the semantic space proper of each language. The current method develops aspects of the distributional semantic approach and of the free association method in understanding emotional meaning and assessing translatability.