The Routledge Handbook of Language and Emotion

Sonya E. Pritzker is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alabama. She is a linguistic and medical anthropologist whose research investigates how both health and healthcare are mediated by interaction in multiple settings. She has published extensively on translation in Chinese medicine, psychology in China, and the communication of emotion in intimate relationships. Janina Fenigsen is a sociocultural and linguistic anthropologist whose research and teaching interests include race, language policy, language contact and creolization, linguistic heritage, health promotion, neoliberalism, and semiotics of emotion. She is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Northern Arizona. James M. Wilce is Emeritus Professor at Northern Arizona University. His research merges linguistic, psychological, and medical anthropology, and has included studies on lament in Bangladesh and Finland, and emotion pedagogies in Arizona. He is the author of many scholarly publications addressing language and emotion.

List of Contributors



Editor’s Introduction














Perspectives on Emotion, Emotionality, and Language: Past and Present


Part I. Emotion and Language Socialization








Insights from Infancy: The Felt Basis of Language in Interpersonal Engagement







Emotion and Affect in Language Socialization







Unfolding Emotions: The Language and Socialization of Anger in Madagascar


Part II. Language and Emotion: Culture, Translation, and Transformation








Affect in the Circulation of Cultural Forms







Emotion, Language, and Cultural Transformation







Emotion in and Through Language Contraction







Cultural Variations in Language and Emotion







The Semantics of Emotion: From Theory to Empirical Analysis


Part III. Language and Emotion: Poetry, Pragmatics and Power








Language and Emotion: Paralinguistic and Performative Dimensions







Poetry and Emotion: Poetic Communion, Ordeals of Language, Intimate Grammars, and Complex Remindings







Language, Music, and Emotion in Lament Poetry: The Embodiment and Performativity of Emotions in Karelian Laments







Expressing Emotion through Forms of Address in Colombian Spanish







Emoji and the Expression of Emotion in Writing







Emotion and Metalanguage







Autism and Emotion: Situating Autistic Emotionality in Interactional, Sociocultural, and Political Contexts







Vocal Affects and Mediated Communication


Part IV. Language, Emotion, and the Affective Body-Self








Language, Emotion, and the Body: Combining Linguistic and Biological Approaches to Interactions Between Romantic Partners







Emotion in the Language of Prayer







Emotion and Gender in Personal Narratives


Part V. Emotion Communities








Laughter, Joy, Sorrow, Stigma: The Making and Breaking of Sign Language Communities







Becoming Blessed: Happiness and Faith in Pentecostal Discourse







Learning Healing Relationality: Dynamics of Religion and Emotion







Emotions and the Evolution of Human Auditory Language





Index