As Wierzbicka suggests in her recent review, language is powerful in emotion.
Wierzbicka's solution is to remove the linguistically relative aspects of emotion
concepts, like icing from a cake, to reveal the universal meanings below. In the
present commentary, I suggest that language is a more fundamental ingredient in
emotion than Wierzbicka's solution assumes; language can be no more removed from
emotion, than flour can be removed from an already baked cake. As an alternate
solution, I present a constructionist view of emotion, which not only recognizes the
role of language in emotion, but also predicts and models its impact as language
constitutes emotion experience.
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