ICOME6 Abstract

Hans-Juergen Diller
Ruhr-Universität Bochum
Email: hans-juergen dot diller at ruhr-uni-bochum dot de

Song on Ifaluk, anger and wrath in Middle English: Diachronic Semantics as bridge-builder

Ifaluk is a small atoll in the Western Pacific ( Federated States of Micronesia) measuring about half a square mile. Academic knowledge of it is largely owing to the works of social anthropologist Catherine A. Lutz (1986, 1988), who visited the atoll in 1977/8 (when it had about 400 inhabitants). Lutz has become a crown witness for all those who regard emotions as socially constructed rather than innate, culture-specific rather than humanly universal. While unambiguous about her position, she is also uncomfortable about its consequences: "the […] pernicious doctrine that, my own group aside, everything human is alien to me" (Lutz 1988: 216, quoting Rosaldo (1984: 188)).

The sense of 'alienation', I suggest, is the result of a strictly synchronic perspective in which linguistic, social and cultural systems appear as windowless monads. While the language of Ifaluk, having no known history, can only be studied synchronically, the history of the "Western" system (which Lutz uses as a foil) is very fully documented. That foil turns out to be a fairly recent development, in some respects even limited to English (as opposed, e.g., to German, Spanish, Polish).

I will illustrate my claim by comparing Ifalukian song to ME anger and wrath. Song ('justifiable anger') contrasts with other lexemes denoting 'anger'. Like wrath, song implies moral valuation, inspires fear, and usually flows from the higher social rank to the lower (Lutz 1988: 169). Connotations of violence, though, are less prominent than in wrath. With the demise of wrath the anger/wrath contrast has largely disappeared from ModE. The Ifaluk evidence will be based on Lutz (1986, 1988); the Middle English on the Corpus of Middle English Verse and Prose and the Innsbruck Computer Archive of Medieval English Texts. The question whether it is legitimate to compare corpus evidence with the results of experiments as used in anthropology and psychology will be duly addressed.

References

Lutz, Catherine A. (1986). "The Domain of Emotion Words on Ifaluk", in: Rom Harré (ed.), The Social Construction of Emotions ( Oxford: Blackwell), pp. 267–88.
Lutz, Catherine A. (1988). Unnatural Emotions. Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll & Their Challenge to Western Theory. ( Chicago: U of Ch P).
Rosaldo, Renato I. (1984): "Grief and a headhunter's rage: On the cultural force of emotions," in: Edward Bruner (ed.), Play, Text, and Story, Proceedings of the 1983 Meeting of the American Ethnological Society. Washington, D.C.)