How to name emotions in languages that express these notions with complex structures

What is it about?

In many languages of the world, emotions and medical conditions are not attributed to an individual, but to a certain body part. For example, instead of saying "I am sad", you may have to say something along the lines of "my heart is heavy" in many languages. In these cases, the meaning of "being sad" does not reside in a single word. "Heart" alone does not express sadness, and neither does "heavy". Only the combination of the two can express this concept. The question is then how such languages form expressions that refer to an abstract emotion such as "sadness" . And the answer is that there are different strategies. One strategy is to say something like "the heaviness of the heart". The Oceanic language Daakaka, however, uses a different strategy. Here, an emotion concept is expressed by a structure such as "the heavy heart". This paper investigates these differences and their implications.

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Why is it important?

On the one hand, this work is relevant to our understanding of how emotions and medical states are conceptualised and verbalised. On the other hand, it stresses the importance of looking beyond individual lexemes in our investigation of derivational processes and patterns.