The Pragmatics of Emotion in Fiction

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Pages: 57-70
DOI: https://doi.org/10.54664/GSYT4069

Abstract:

Emotions are an essential part of fictional artefacts, such as novels, short stories, plays or movies. It is the paradox of fiction that readers and viewers experience emotions on the basis of what they know to be fictitious emotions presented in these fictional artefacts. A pragmatic approach helps us to describe how language is used to discursively create emotions in fictional contexts. In this contribution, I present some of the basic ways in which this is done. I will briefly introduce a process theory of emotions and distinguish between the showing mode and the telling mode of presenting emotions in fictional artefacts. Two case studies explore the emotion vocabulary that is used to describe and characterise fictional texts and how emotion vocabulary is used in the fictional texts themselves. The first case study looks at the emotion tags used on the fan-fiction website Archive of Our Own (A3O), and the second investigates the distribution of the most frequent emotion terms across the different registers of the Corpus of Contemporary American English.

Keywords:

emotions, pragmatics, corpus pragmatics, fiction, fan fiction, paradox of fiction

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