A Comparative Study of Emotion Lexicon in French and Ewe

Abstract

The grammar of sentiments has been widely studied in the French language and has even been the theme for journal articles for the 1995 edition of Langages. However, there exists very little on sentiment lexicon in Ewe. The only existing literature seem to be an article by Ameka (2002) on cultural scripting of body parts for emotions. Even then, this article only focused on jealousy and related emotions. Ameka's thesis on the Ewe language (1991) also devotes a section to predicates of emotion, linked to experiences and perception. Though ground-breaking and very instructive, they do not provide an in-depth/detailed description of the emotion lexicon in the language. This leaves a field which can be added to. This presentation, which is part of an ongoing project seeks to establish a list of emotion lexicon in Ewe similar to the list that has been established for French within the Lexical-Grammar framework for French. Secondly, it seeks to discover the differences in the local grammars of the two languages as far as expressing emotion is concerned. This project studies emotion lexicon in French and Ewe. It fulfills a double objective of firstly providing a comprehensive list of emotion lexicon in Ewe, and secondly, undertaking a semantic and syntactic comparison of constructions of emotion lexicon in the two languages. Specifically, the study looks at nominal constructions with emotion lexicon and verbal constructions with emotion lexicon to investigate how the world view is expressed through emotion lexicon and how this differs cross-linguistically. This project contributes to understanding the grammar of the ewe language which has been relatively less studied than the French language. This comparison between a western language and an African language also challenges certain assertions that have been made about emotion lexicon based solely on western languages and posits that emotion lexicon are language-specific and that there is not direct equivalence for all instances of emotion lexicon from French to Ewe.