Emotive Intensionality, Meaning and Grammar

Mondal, Prakash (2016) Emotive Intensionality, Meaning and Grammar. In: Language and Cognitive Structures of Emotion. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, pp. 71-110. ISBN 978-3-319-33689-3

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Abstract

This chapter attempts to show how insights from the nature of emotive intensionality can be marshaled to bear on fundamental concepts about meaning in grammar. In so doing it will illustrate how the insights and implications ensuing from the analyses of data on emotive intensionality in different languages can impact the fundamental concept of how meaning is derived in natural language. Before we proceed, we can recapitulate the insights and observations from the earlier chapters. One noteworthy insight is that the emotion-perception homology in emotive expressions may run deeper at the fundamental level of organization of cognition, as indicated in the earlier chapters. Such fundamental commonalities between emotion and perception line up well with what has been garnered about the nature of emotive contents by means of an inspection of the behavior of emotive expressions in cases of logical equivalence and ontological equivalence. The emotion-perception homology, as dealt with in Chapter 2, may lead us believe that aspects of perception mirrored in emotive content also show significant regularities in having a non-conceptual character unaffected by inferences, reason and rationality. This is indeed the case in many visual experiences, such as change-blindness, exposure effect and the McGurk effect (for details, see Eagleman 2011). However, such a non-conceptual character of emotion is grounded in the fabric of the cognitive structures of emotive expressions in such a manner that the non-conceptual character of emotion has to be distilled from the cognitive structures of emotive expressions anyway. This suggests that the non-conceptual character of emotion may at least be representational but remain non-conceptual nonetheless. This representational form of the non-conceptual character of emotion may be due to emotive intensionality, as suggested in Chapter 2. Such cases of parallels between emotion and perception do not seem to be out of the way, as the fact that they have homologies at levels of organization and operation may well reflect the design principles of evolution which often run on replications and refinements of the existing structures.

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