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Toward an Architecture of the Language–Emotion Interface

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Abstract

This chapter aims to uncover the operations at the ‘interface’ connecting language to emotive structures. So far what has been projected from the ongoing discussion on the nature of emotive intensionality is that emotion is a relation that associates intensional structures from language with patterns of cognitive structures of emotive expressions, or vice versa. This has been summed up in the form The Correspondence Theorem. An informal proof will be provided later in this chapter. Therefore, this chapter will substantiate the theorem in great depth, sketching in a precise manner the nature of operations that occur at the interface that connects the domain of language to that of emotion. The theorem will help lay out a detailed account of what happens at the interface when language liaises with emotion. Insights into the nature of operations at the language–emotion interface will be extrapolated to a development of the architecture of that interface. Once the form of this architecture is specified and spelt out in sufficient details, relevant generalizations on the relation between language and other cognitive domains can also be indicated.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The term ‘computational’ here involves references to computations, and hence it may lead one to arrive at the conclusion that computations run in the cognitive system of the interface between language and emotion. Nothing of this sort is implied here. That is, no computational assumption about the nature of the operations running at the interface between language and emotion regarded as cognitive domains is made here. Rather, the terms ‘computational’ and ‘computation’ are used in their trivial sense attaching to the calculation of certain quantitative values. This is the intended interpretation which does not therefore make any commitment as to whether computations run in the mind. As a matter of fact, the idea that computations are performed by the language faculty in the mind (see Chomsky 1995) has been demonstrated to be fundamentally flawed and deeply misguided by Mondal (2014b).

  2. 2.

    This has been taken from Annie (1986). But the categorization of emotive predicates presented here has significant differences from the classification of emotive predicates Annie (1986) has come up with.

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Mondal, P. (2016). Toward an Architecture of the Language–Emotion Interface. In: Language and Cognitive Structures of Emotion. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33690-9_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33690-9_4

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

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