Abstract

A Pragmatic Study of Emotional Expressions in Selected Literary Texts

Abeer Nabiel Rashad, Prof. Dr. Abdulkarim Fadhil Jameel

Volume: 11 Issue: 3 2021

Abstract:

Emotional expressions are perceptible verbal and nonverbal practices that communicate an inner emotional or full of feeling state. Emotions give sense to our exists and let us care for ourselves and others. They make us human. Without emotion, we would be like machines that work to serve a purpose but without any definite meaning. Emotions are one of the most vital aspects of our lives. They give meaning to life and the way in which we communicate with the individuals around us. The emotional expressions are (Happiness, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, Contempt, Surprise, Anger, Acceptance, Anguish, Interest, Shame ,Shyness, Guilt, Anticipation). The present research is a linguistic study that aims at revealing and studying the pragmatic perspectives of emotional expressions in selected literary texts . The study presents a clear theoretical account of the notion of emotion, its types, polarity, intensity and the way it can be conceptually analyzed. The research also offers some other related concepts that pertain to pragmatics, speech act. So, the purpose of this study to answer the questions: What are the emotional expressions used in the literary texts? and,?, investigating the variant types, the polarity and intensity of these emotional expressions. Because it creates the situations for the largest functional presentation of their pragmatic potential, a literary text was chosen as the source of emotional expressions. To realize the aims, Ekman(1992) as a model of emotions is used to analyze four literary texts that selected randomly . The research found that emotional expressions help to better comprehension of the speaker’s illocution and that linguistic factors determine the severity (intensity) of illocution. The expression of emotions clarifies the speaker’s intent and enhanced the pragmatic results. Moreover, it has been shown that the context discovers the exact intention. In addition, this study reveals that literary texts employ the anger as the major emotion and, the negative emotions dominate the selected texts.

DOI: http://doi.org/10.37648/ijrssh.v11i03.004

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