Emotions in Adonara-Lamaholot

• Main Author: Elvis Albertus Toni
• Other Authors: Francis Bond
• Format: Theses and Dissertations
• Language: English
• Published: 2018
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities::Linguistics
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/88960; http://hdl.handle.net/10220/46132
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This study deals with linguistic expressions of emotions in Adonara-Lamaholot, a dialect of Lamaholot language spoken on Adonara Island of Eastern Indonesia. The study documents and examines the linguistic expressions of emotions used in casual speech and poetic texts. It aims to address the research questions: (i) What is the linguistic structure of expressions of emotion in Adonara-Lamaholot used in (a) casual speech, and (b) poetic texts? (ii) What meanings are expressed in the linguistic expressions of emotions in Adonara-Lamaholot? (iii) What are conceptual metaphors and metonymies encoded by the expressions of emotions? The study reveals that the expressions of emotions used in casual speech of Adonara-Lamaholot are in form of clauses. The clauses fall into six types (i.e. 1a, 1b, 2a, 2b, 3, and 4). The roots of the predicates for clause types 1a, 1b, 2a, and 2b can be a pure intransitive verb, an intransitive verb, an adjective or a noun (for 1a and 1b). The subjects of the majority of the clauses are body part nouns (internal and external parts) and body part related nouns (bodily fluid terms). This phenomenon supports the claim that the use of body part nouns as a part of expressions of emotions is common to many languages (Enfield and Wierzbicka, 2002). The nouns collocate with predicates in various ways. Some nouns can collocate with more than one predicate but others can collocate with only one. By mapping their meanings, this study uncovers that the expressions of emotions used in the casual speech are grouped into six categories. Category 1 includes the expressions describing emotions of anger and disappointment. Category 2 consists of the expressions describing the feelings of love and lust. Category 3 refers to the expressions describing the feelings of sadness of loss, being ignored, sympathy, and nostalgia. The expressions in Category 4 describe the feelings of joy and relief. Category 5 includes the expressions describing the feelings of fear/being scared and nervous. The expressions in Category 6 describe the feeling of being embarrassed or humiliated, being guilty, and being shy or nervous. The expressions of emotions used in poetic texts display several specific features. Firstly, the expressions of emotion used in poetic text form parallelisms. The parallelisms are phonological, syntactical and semantically synonymous, antonymous, and synthetic. Secondly, there are lexical, phonological, syntactic features that differ from the expressions of emotion used in casual speech. This study also reveals that the expressions of emotions used in casual speech and in poetic texts encode conceptual metaphors. Some of the conceptual metaphors and metonymies are shared between Adonara-Lamaholot and English (E.g. ANGER IS FIRE). However, some are language specific (e.g. ANGER IS A VALUELESS TOKEN OF TRANSACTION). Additionally, the body part nouns used to form the expressions of emotions also encode conceptual metaphors and metonymies. The most productive body parts in encoding conceptual reading are one=k ‘insides’ and aé=k ‘face’.