Emoções, cognição e variação intralinguística e cultural

The main hypothesis of the present study is the idea that even though emotions have a biological foundation, they are socially and culturally constructed. As physiological experiences conditioned by culture and intersubjectively manifested, emotions are permeable to social variation and cultural influences. The way emotions are conceptualised, understood, experienced, communicated, (not)controlled and evaluated can differ between societies and cultures and, not only between different languages, but also within the same language. This study explores the cultural conceptualization of emotions in the two main national varieties of Portuguese, namely European Portuguese (EP) and Brazilian Portuguese (BP). By adopting a sociocognitive view of language and by applying a corpus-based and profile-based methodology, this study combines a multifactorial usage-feature and metaphorical profile analysis of over one thousand examples of anger, pride and love from a corpus of personal-experiential blogs with their subsequent multivariate statistics modeling. The differences in the conceptual structuring and metaphorical representation of these emotions between EP and BP are consistent with the more individualistic, indulgent, and emotionally expressive culture of Brazil and the more collectivistic and restrained culture of Portugal. The results of the present study carry empirical evidence on the cultural variability of emotions in the same pluricentric language, more generally, on the interaction between emotion, language, cognition and culture, as well as on the importance of the so-called “social and empirical turn” in Cognitive Linguistics.