Introduction: Intensionality and Emotive Expressions

Mondal, Prakash (2016) Introduction: Intensionality and Emotive Expressions. In: Language and Cognitive Structures of Emotion. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, pp. 1-47. ISBN 978-3-319-33689-3

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Abstract

The connections between intensionality and emotive content as expressed in natural language will be traced to determine how patterns in the relation between intensionality and emotive expressions reveal something about the way emotion as an independent component of the human mind interacts with the cognitive domain of language. Intensionality cannot be characterized without the notion of intentionality in that intensionality has something to do with non-specificity or opacity, and this opacity has partly to do with the underdetermination or underspecification of aboutness or directedness toward objects or entities, which characterizes the essence of intentionality. Such non-specificity or opacity has parallels in both language and structures of emotive content in the sense that intensional elements in quantificational contexts show a systematic semantic variability in the way non-specificity or opacity is expressed, and contents of (emotional) affect reveal similar patterns. Another reason why two distinct but otherwise related phenomena—intensionality and intentionality—are co-defined in association with each other is that intentionality appears to be a much more primitive form of biological feature (and maybe it was also present in earlier life-forms) from which language—especially linguistic meaning—has evolved (Searle 1983). And intensionality constitutes a significant and, at the same time, baffling aspect of linguistic meaning.

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