Russian Emotion Vocabulary in American Learners - The Astro

Russian Emotion Vocabularyin American Learners’ NarrativesANETA PAVLENKOCITE DepartmentCollege of EducationTemple UniversityPhiladelphia, PA 19122Email: [email protected]

VIKTORIA DRIAGINA305 Sparks BuildingPennsylvania State UniversityUniversity Park, PA 16802Email: [email protected]

This study compared the uses of emotion vocabulary in narratives elicited from monolingualspeakers of Russian and English and advanced American learners of Russian. Monolingualspeakers differed significantly in the distribution of emotion terms across morphosyntacticcategories: English speakers favored an adjectival pattern of emotion description, and Russianspeakers a verbal one. Advanced American learners of Russian shifted from the adjectival tothe verbal pattern in Russian and thus began approximating the usage of native speakers ofRussian. At the same time, the data revealed 6 areas where learner usage differed from themonolingual Russian corpus: morphosyntactic transfer from the first language (L1), semantictransfer from the L1, greater use of adverbial constructions, absence of a language-specificverb frequently used by native Russian speakers, violations of appropriateness of sociolinguisticregister, and a significantly lower proportion of emotion word tokens.

ALL OF OUR CONVERSATIONS, SHORT ORlong, superficial or heart-to-heart, involve someform of emotion talk. “How are you today? Is every-thing okay? You look sad.” “I am okay, just stressedout.” “How is she doing? This must be very frustrat-ing for her.” We are always engaged in attempts toexpress—or, for that matter, hide—our own feel-ings and to evaluate and describe the emotionsof others. At times, we come up short, failing toexplain adequately how we feel, or to understandwhether our interlocutor is upset, frustrated, orsimply tired. The task of interpreting, commu-nicating, and describing emotions in a secondlanguage (L2) is even harder because differentlanguages have distinct emotion vocabularies andways of expressing emotions.

Dewaele (2005) called for closer investigationof emotion expression in instructed languagelearning. The goal of the study reported here wasto examine how advanced American learners ofRussian use Russian emotion vocabulary to de-scribe others’ feelings. Our discussion begins withan overview of previous studies of the emotion

The Modern Language Journal, 91, ii, (2007)0026-7902/07/213–234 $1.50/0C©2007 The Modern Language Journal

vocabulary of L2 learners. We subsequently dis-cuss similarities and differences between Russianand English emotion lexicons and introduce astudy in which we compared lexical choices ofAmerican learners of Russian to ones made bynative speakers of Russian and English in the con-text of the same task. We end by discussing theimplications of our findings for the structure ofthe bilingual mental lexicon and for foreign lan-guage (FL) instruction.

EMOTION VOCABULARY IN LEARNERLANGUAGE

Emotions can undoubtedly be expressedthrough a variety of verbal and nonverbal chan-nels, including body language, facial expressions,and intonation. Here, however, we focus on lex-icon, a key area in FL instruction. Linguists, psy-chologists, and anthropologists studying the emo-tion lexicon are commonly concerned with one offour areas: (a) emotion words, (b) emotion-ladenwords, (c) emotion expressions and metaphors,or (d) emotion discourse.

The majority of the studies focus on emo-tion words, such as anger , joy, or sadness, thatrefer directly to particular feelings (Apresjan,1997; Johnson-Laird & Oatley, 1989; Levontina &

214 The Modern Language Journal 91 (2007)

Zalizniak, 2001; Stepanova & Coley, 2002;Wierzbicka, 1999; Zalizniak, Levontina, &Shmelev, 2005). These words are relatively easyto single out and study because they constitute amore or less defined category, or at least a cate-gory with clear prototypes.

Recently, scholars have begun consideringemotion-laden words, that is, words such as en-dearments or taboo and swear words, that in-dex or elicit speakers’ emotions from interlocu-tors without necessarily naming them (Altarriba &Canary, 2004; Harris, 2004). At present, researchon emotion-laden words is in its beginning stagesbecause this category is more fluid and open-ended than that of emotion words, with wordsgaining different emotion connotations and af-fective functions depending on the context (e.g.,Democrats or Republicans may function as abstractwords in some contexts and as positively or neg-atively charged words in others). The boundarybetween the two categories is not clear-cut either,and in some instances, emotion words may serveboth referential and affective functions (e.g., Whata joy! , What a horror!).

The third area of study involves emotion expres-sions and metaphors and examines them from se-mantic, lexicographic, and cognitive standpoints(Apresjan & Apresjan, 2000; Kovecses, 2000).The fourth area involves emotion discourse,that is, ways in which speakers deploy emo-tion and emotion-laden words, expressions, andmetaphors in various forms of discourse, includ-ing personal narratives, oral interaction, and writ-ten texts (Bloch, 1996; Kyratzis, 2001; Lutz, 1996;Pavlenko, 2002a, 2002b; Ries, 1997; Rintell, 1990;Sharonov, 2005; Shimanoff, 1983).

For this study, we combined the first and thefourth approaches to examine the uses of emo-tion words in narratives by advanced FL learners;we also considered the uses of emotion expres-sions and metaphors in their narratives. Beforediscussing the study, however, we briefly review thefew other investigations that have addressed theuses of emotion vocabulary by FL and L2 learn-ers. (For a review of research on identification ofemotions by FL and L2 learners, see Dewaele &Pavlenko, 2002.)

Rintell (1990) was among the first scholars toexamine the emotion talk of L2 learners. Shecompared the uses of emotion vocabulary in per-sonal narratives of 6 native speakers of Englishand 8 intermediate L2 learners of English. Rintellfound that the learners’ stories were less elaboratethan those told by the native speakers of English,and that they lacked several features, such as fig-urative language, reported speech, epithets, and

depersonalization, that made the native speakers’stories vivid and engaging.

Toya and Kodis (1996) compared the responsesof 10 native speakers of English and 10 Japaneselearners of English to five scenarios that couldpotentially elicit anger. The researchers detectedboth similarities and differences in the partic-ipants’ responses. For example, in a scenarioin which a vending machine “ate” one’s lunchmoney, the native speakers of English said thatthey would react verbally (curse) and physically(perhaps kick or punch the machine). The L2learners stated that they would express their angerverbally or would not be angry at all at an inani-mate object. In another scenario involving waitingin a restaurant for 30 minutes, more L2 learnersof English than native speakers of English statedthat they would be angry and would feel justifiedin expressing their anger verbally. Overall, the re-sponses showed that L2 learners did not consis-tently interpret the scenarios in the same way asnative speakers of English did. In some instances,they did not know how to express their anger ad-equately in English or did not feel comfortabledoing so.

Although interesting and informative, thesetwo studies share some common weaknesses: alow number of participants and, as a result, alack of generalizability, as well as a lack of con-trol for the influence of such variables as gen-der and language proficiency. A larger number ofparticipants took part in Dewaele and Pavlenko’s(2002) study that examined emotion vocabularyin the speech of 29 Dutch learners of French and34 Russian learners of English. The researchersfound that the use of emotion vocabulary maybe affected by language proficiency, gender, de-gree of extraversion, sociocultural competence,and the type of linguistic material.

Language proficiency effects were found onlyin the L2 French corpus, where highly proficientlearners used more emotion word tokens thanlearners with medium and low levels of profi-ciency. It was somewhat counterintuitive, however,that these highly proficient learners did not ap-pear to use more emotion lemmas; that is, theydid not seem to have richer emotion vocabular-ies than medium- and low-proficiency learners.These findings require further examination witha larger participant pool. Gender was also a factoronly in the L2 French corpus; female learners hadricher emotion vocabularies than males. Therewere no significant differences between men andwomen in the L2 English corpus. This differencemay be explained by the fact that the two sets ofparticipants performed different tasks.

Aneta Pavlenko and Viktoria Driagina 215

Dewaele and Pavlenko’s (2002) study offeredan important contribution to our understandingof L2 learning of emotion vocabulary, but it hada number of limitations. The first limitation wasa lack of clarity in terms of the researchers’ an-alytical choices and assumptions. For instance,the researchers examined the numbers of emo-tion lemmas and tokens used by the speakers,but did not clarify the nature of the relationshipbetween the number of emotion words used byspeakers and their knowledge of emotion vocabu-lary. The second limitation of the study was thelack of differentiation between emotion words(anger , love , sadness), emotion-laden words (ill-ness, death, hooker), and evaluative words (certain,reliable , ideal), all of which were examined as emo-tion words. The inclusion of evaluative vocabu-lary raises questions concerning the validity of thefindings with regard to emotion vocabulary perse. Finally, the two corpora did not have a suffi-cient number of participants to explore fully theinfluence of the key variables. For instance, theL2 French corpus had 6 highly proficient speak-ers, 18 medium-proficiency speakers, and 5 low-proficiency speakers. A comparison of such smalland uneven groups does not allow for general-izations about the influence of language profi-ciency.

SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES BETWEENRUSSIAN AND ENGLISH EMOTIONLEXICONS

In this study, we attempted to avoid some ofthese limitations by focusing on emotion words,by using a comparatively large number of partic-ipants (n = 129), and by controlling for genderand socioeducational background. We also com-bined quantitative and qualitative approaches toexamine ways in which the American learnersused Russian emotion vocabulary. Most impor-tant, we grounded the study in a particular analyt-ical approach—contrastive learner corpus analy-sis. In this approach, corpora comparable in sizeare collected from learners as well as from nativespeakers of the learners’ L1 and L2 who are sim-ilar to the learners in age, gender, and socioedu-cational background. Learners’ L2 performanceis then compared to the native speaker corporato uncover similarities and differences betweenthem (Altenberg & Granger, 2001; Belz & Vyatk-ina, 2005). Contrastive learner corpus analysis hasbeen gaining ground in second language acquisi-tion studies as a method that helps ascertain thesource of L2 learner errors, assess the importanceof L1 transfer, and detect covert divergences in

language use by L2 learners and native speakersbeyond error analysis (Aijmer & Altenberg, 1996;Altenberg, 2002; Granger, 1996; Johansson, 2003;Liu & Shaw, 2001; Pavlenko, 2002b).

In what follows, we discuss differences be-tween Russian and English emotion words in fourareas: distribution of words across morphosyn-tactic categories, preferred patterns of emotioncoding, syntactic constructions and subcatego-rization frames, and language-specific emotionwords. Many more differences undoubtedly ex-ist between the two languages, in particular in theareas of semantics, pragmatics, and discourse (cf.,Bogdanovich-Werner, 2005; Levontina & Zaliz-niak, 2001; Stepanova & Coley, 2002; Wierzbicka,1992, 1998; Zalizniak et al., 2005). We have, how-ever, limited our discussion to issues informingour research design and analysis.

Distribution of Words Across Categories

Both Russian and English have emotionnouns (e.g., radost�/joy), adjectives and pseudo-participles (e.g., rasstroenny�/upset), adverbs(e.g., grustno/sadly), transitive verbs (e.g.,rasstroit� kogo-to/to upset someone), and in-transitive verbs (e.g., volnovat�s�/to worry). Themorphosyntactic categories are the same in thetwo languages. What differs is the distribution ofterms across categories: Russian has a high num-ber of intransitive verbs, whereas English has onlya few, such as to rejoice , to worry, to fume , or to grieve(Wierzbicka, 1992).

Preferred Pattern of Emotion Coding or Description

A second difference lies in the preferred pat-tern of emotion coding or description. Englishfavors adjectives or pseudoparticiples, such asupset , worried , or disgusted , that refer to innerstates. These terms are often used with copulaverbs, such as the state verb to be , change-of-state verbs to become and to get , and perceptionverbs to seem, to appear , to look, and to feel . Incontrast, Russian speakers distribute their choicesmore evenly across nouns, adjectives, verbs, andadverbs (Pavlenko, 2002a). They nevertheless fa-vor verbs and, in particular, intransitive and re-flexive emotion verbs that mark aspect and dura-tion of particular actions and processes, as seen inExample 1.

Wierzbicka (1992) argued that these lexicaliza-tion differences, namely, the preference for anadjectival pattern in English and a verbal patternin Russian, are indicative of dominant conceptu-alizations of emotions in the two languages. In


Example 1

Elena zagrustila Elena got sad. (literally: beganmanufacturing sadness)

Deti razveselilis�. The children began to have fun. (literally:began to enjoy themselves)

Ne nervniqa�! Don’t worry! (literally: Don’t be worrying.)Horoxo, qto ty prixla, a to � u�evolnu�s�.

Good thing you arrived,because I am already worried. (literally:worrying [myself])

Nu kak ona tam, pere�ivaet? So, how is she, worrying [herself]?Ne obi�a�s� na men�, po�alu�sta,�to � tak sgor�qa l�pnula, ne podumav.

Don’t be offended/upset with me, please,I just blurted it out without thinking.

her view, emotions are conceptualized in Russianas inner activities in which one engages more orless voluntarily, whereas in English they are con-ceptualized as passive states resulting from eitherexternal or past causes.

A somewhat different argument about lexi-calization differences was put forth by Semin,Gorts, Nandram, and Semin-Goossens (2002).They found that the working emotion lexiconsof Dutch speakers contain more emotion nouns,whereas the working emotion lexicons of Hin-dustani speakers contain more emotion verbs.They interpreted these findings as suggestingthat cultures that emphasize independence andindividuality represent emotions through adjec-tives and nouns that function as self-markers. Incontrast, cultures that stress interdependence fa-vor emotion verbs that function as relationshipmarkers. Wierzbicka’s (2004) discussion of Pol-ish emotion verbs that refer to relationships—similar to their Russian counterparts serdit�s�‘to be cross at someone/angry with someone’or obi�at�s� ‘to be hurt by someone/to feelupset with someone’—lends support to thisview.

Syntactic Constructions and SubcategorizationFrames

It is important that Russian—unlike manyother European languages—allows its speakersto present subjects not only as agents but alsoas passive experiencers, through an abundanceof impersonal constructions (Wierzbicka, 1992).

Example 2

Mne obidno. I am hurt/offended.(literally: [To] me [it is] hurtful.)

Sone stalo grustno. Sonia got sad.(literally: [To] Sonia [it] became sad.)

Mihailu budet stydno. Michael will be ashamed/embarrassed.(literally: [To] Michael [it] will be embarrassing.)

These constructions involve nouns or pronounsin the dative case, emotion adverbs function-ing as predicates, and, in the past and futuretenses, the change-of-state verbs byt� ‘to be’ andstanovit�s� ‘to become’. (These constructionsare illustrated in Example 2.) Although Englishalso has impersonal constructions (e.g., It is diffi-cult for me to disagree), they are not as prominentin emotion expression as they are in Russian.

The second important cross-linguistic differ-ence in morphosyntactic constructions usedto describe emotions involves combinations ofstate verbs (byt�/to be), change-of-state verbs(stat�/to become), and perception copula verbs(vygl�det�/to look, quvstvovat�/to feel) withemotion adverbs and adjectives. In English, thisconstruction is common, whereas Russian speak-ers in similar contexts often opt either for emo-tion verbs or for impersonal constructions, as inExample 3.

Literal translations of these constructions arealso possible, even though they are significantlyless frequent and not always semantically appro-priate. These constructions involve emotion ad-jectives in the instrumental case, for example,Ona vygl�dela soverxenno nesqastno� ‘Shelooked completely unhappy’.

In the same way, constructions with to looklike , which are very common in English, can betranslated into Russian with the help of the di-rect translation equivalents kak and kak budto,but they are not particularly common and maysound awkward. Such translations are shown inExample 4.


Example 3

Jenny looked sad. �en� grustila.(literally: Jenny was manufacturing sadness.)�ene bylo grustno.(literally: [To] Jenny [it] was sad.)

Example 4

He looks like he is going to cry.(common in English)

U nego tako� vid, kak budto on sobiraets�plakat�.On vygl�dit, kak budto on sobiraets� plakat�.(Both are grammatically correct but uncommon andawkward in Russian.)

Poho�e, qto on vot-vot zaplaqet.(common in Russian)

It seems that he is about to burst into tears. (literally:begin crying)

Language- and Culture-Specific Emotion Words

Each language also has some words that lacktranslation equivalents in the other language. En-glish, for instance, has no exact translation ofthe Russian verb pere�ivat� (perezhivat’) thatrefers to the process of worrying, taking thingshard and experiencing them keenly, or, liter-ally, suffering things through. In turn, Russiandoes not have single-word equivalents of suchcommon English emotion words as fun or frus-tration. Elena Koreneva (2003), a well-knownRussian actress who had lived for a while inthe United States with her American husband,wrote in her memoirs that “frustration—quvstvoneudovletvoreni�, smexannoe s dosado�,kotoroe voznikaet posle bol�xih o�idani�”(frustration—a feeling of dissatisfaction mixedwith vexation/annoyance that appears after greatexpectations) is impossible to translate into Rus-sian with one word (p. 383). As a consequence,American students have to find alternative lin-guistic means when rendering these and otheruntranslatable emotion words in Russian. For ex-ample, We were having fun would be rendered Nambylo veselo (literally: [It] was joyful [to] us).

With all these semantic and morphosyntacticdifferences in mind, let us now see what hap-pens when advanced American learners talk aboutemotions in Russian.

RESEARCH DESIGN

Objective

The purpose of this study was to determinewhether advanced American learners of Russianwould use Russian emotion vocabulary similarlyto native speakers of Russian in the context of thesame task, and, when they did not, to identify thesources of their difficulties and errors.

Method

In accordance with the contrastive learner cor-pus analysis approach adopted here, we collecteddata from advanced American learners of Rus-sian and from native speakers of the learners’ L1(English) and L2 (Russian) who were similar tothe learners in age, gender, and socioeducationalbackground. The native Russian corpus allowedus to identify the range of language variation inthe target language and to assess the Americanlearners in comparison to a real, rather than anidealized, reference group. The native Englishcorpus allowed us to determine whether partic-ular errors stemmed from L1 transfer.

In selecting among different types of data wecould have collected, we chose elicited narratives,that is, narratives elicited through the use of vi-sual or verbal stimuli. Narrative elicitation enjoysthe advantages of both experimental and ethno-graphic approaches to the study of language use.On the one hand, narratives, unlike vocabularytests, allow researchers to study language use incontext. On the other hand, elicited narratives of-fer a measure of control: All participants describethe same stimulus, and, consequently, their lexi-cal choices can be meaningfully compared acrossgroups.

Stimulus

In choosing an elicitation stimulus, we optedfor a visual rather than verbal stimulus becauseit allowed us to compare how various groups ofspeakers categorize and name specific aspects ofthe world around them and, in the present case,how they interpret and describe other people’semotions. Because none of the commonly used vi-sual prompts target emotion vocabulary, we useda 3-minute film, The Letter , with a musical sound-track but no verbal exchanges, created specifically


for this study. In the film, a young woman comeshome, gets her mail, opens a letter, reads it, andbecomes visibly upset. Her roommate comes in,tries to talk to her unsuccessfully, sees the letter,and begins reading it without permission. Thefirst woman notices that the roommate is read-ing her letter, grabs the letter, and stomps out ofthe room. The participants describing this filmhad to display their skills of creating third-persondescriptions, that is, descriptions of emotions ofothers around them.

Participants

To take into account linguistic variation stem-ming from geographic and socioeducational fac-tors, we collected monolinguals’ narratives in twodifferent geographic locations and at two differ-ent types of universities: elite cosmopolitan uni-versities (Cornell University and the Universityof St. Petersburg) and large public universities,one located in a rural area in the United States(Pennsylvania State University) and the other ina midsize Siberian town in Russia (Tomsk StateUniversity). Three sets of corpora were collectedin the study:

1. Russian narratives were collected from 49participants who had only minimal knowledgeof either German, English, or French. Of theseparticipants, 20 native speakers of Russian (10 fe-males, 10 males), aged between 18 and 26 years,were undergraduate students at the Universityof St. Petersburg. The other 29 native speakersof Russian (21 females, 8 males), aged between18 and 21 years, were undergraduate students atTomsk State University.

2. English narratives were collected from 50participants who had only minimal knowledge ofeither French, Spanish, or Latin. Of these partic-ipants, 20 native speakers of English (10 females,10 males), aged between 18 and 26 years, were un-dergraduate students at Cornell University. Theother 30 native speakers of English (15 females,15 males), aged between 18 and 24 years, wereundergraduate students at the Pennsylvania StateUniversity.

3. L2 Russian narratives were collected from30 advanced American learners of Russian (15females, 15 males); undergraduate and gradu-ate students enrolled in 6th and 7th level, andin graduate-level Russian courses in the intensiveimmersion program at the Middlebury SummerRussian School.

The age range of the L2 learners was widerthan in the previous two samples: 19 participants

(9 females, 10 males) were between the ages of19 and 24 years (M = 22.2 years), and 11 partici-pants (6 females, 5 males) were between the agesof 28 and 56 years (M = 35.7 years). Althoughthe students differed in the length of their studyof Russian (a range of 1–16 years, M = 5.3 years),their skills were relatively similar. On a 7-pointscale where 1 equaled poor and 7 native-like , mostof the L2 learners saw themselves as best at read-ing (M = 4.9) and weakest at writing (M = 4.2),with listening (M = 4.7) and speaking skills (M =4.3) somewhere in between.

Data Collection and Analysis

We interviewed each participant separately.They first watched the film and then recalled it,speaking directly into a tape recorder. We chose toelicit oral, rather than written, narratives becauseoral narratives are more representative of spon-taneous speech. We subsequently transcribed allthe tapes in the language of the original. We iden-tified and underlined emotion words (for lists ofemotion words produced by each group see Ap-pendixes A, B, and C) and analyzed the uses ofthese words across groups, both quantitatively andqualitatively. The quantitative analysis focused onthe influence of native language, gender, and so-cioeconomic background on the narrative length,the size and richness of emotion vocabulary, andthe distribution of emotion words across mor-phosyntactic categories. The qualitative analysisexamined linguistic factors that affected lexicaland morphosyntactic choices. Throughout ouranalysis, we distinguished between lemmas (unitsof meaning or words) and tokens (lexical items orlexemes).

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Narratives

The three narratives below are fairly represen-tative of the respective corpora from which theycame: the Russian corpus, the English corpus,and the L2 learner corpus, respectively. Emotionwords, that is, words naming particular emotions,are underlined.

Russian Corpus: Olga, 20 Years Old, Studentat Tomsk State University, Accounting Major. Nu,fil�m naqinaets� s togo qto . . . � . . . � . . . vkadre po�vl�ets� devuxka, dovol�no sim-patiqna�, � . . . nu ne/qut�-qut� nebre�noodeta�. Vot, ona idet po ulice mimo,


� . . .domov, vot . . . zahodit, � . . . k sebe domo�,� . . .razbiraet . . . poqtu, � . . . nu . . .beretpis�ma, � . . .razdevaets�, prohodit v kom-natu, sadits� v kreslo, � . . . z/otkryvaetpis�mo, naqinaet qitat� ego i . . . nu,soder�imoe e� �vno . . . pis�ma ne oqen�nravits�, ona �to . . . ogorqaets� oqen�,nu i potom ona uglubl�ets� . . . ewe, nudal�xe qitaet. M-m . . . voobwe oqen� sil�norasstraivaets�, � . . . kladet pis�mo nastol, pere�ivaet, beret op�t� v rukipis�mo, op�t� m-m pereqityvaet, oqev-idno, konec tam, ili qto . . . �, vot . . . op�t�rasstraivaets�, hvataets� za golovurukami, vot, potom v komnatu zahodit . . .m-m ili podruga, ili sestra . . .devuxkakaka�-to . . . � . . . nu smotrit, qto . . . ta de-vuxka pere�ivaet, mo�et ona hoqet e�posoquvstvovat� ili qto . . .uznat� vqem delo, beret pis�mo, � . . . to�e egoqitaet, � . . . vot . . . nu naverno da�e nedoqitav pis�mo, � . . . ta perva� devuxkavstaet, � . . . kak by . . . nu, ne to qto vyh-vatyvaet, no tak . . .beret . . .iz ruk to�vtoro� . . . �. . . pis�mo. . . i uhodit, tak. . .qut�-qut� na/na nervah. Vot po�alu� vse.

Well, the movie begins with . . . . uhm . . . uhm . . . onthe screen appears a young woman, quite pretty,uhm . . . not/somewhat sloppily dressed. So, she iswalking down the street, by, uhm . . . some houses,so . . . [she] comes in, uhm . . . home, uhm . . . sortsout . . . the mail, uhm . . . well . . . takes her letters,uhm . . . takes off [her coat], comes into the room,sits down in an armchair, uhm . . . opens a letter,begins reading it and . . . well, the content doesn’tseem . . . . [she] doesn’t like the content of the letter,she, well . . . gets very distressed, and then shereads again . . . again, reads it further. Uhm . . . getsreally upset, uhm . . . puts the letter on the ta-ble . . . suffers [literally: experiences deep emotions],then takes the letter again, again uhm rereads, appar-ently, the ending or something . . . uhm, so . . . againgets upset, grabs her head, well, then enters theroom . . . uhm, either a friend, or her sister . . . someyoung woman . . . uhm . . . well, [she] sees that . . . theother woman is suffering, maybe she wantsto empathize or something . . . to learn what is go-ing on, takes the letter, uhm . . . also reads it,uhm . . . well . . . possibly, without having finished theletter, uhm . . . the first woman gets up, uhm . . . asif . . . well, not grabs, but . . . takes . . . from the handsof the other woman . . . uhm . . . the letter . . . and leaves,so . . . somewhat st/stressed out [literally: on nerves].That’s it, I think.

English Corpus: Jeremy, 19 Years Old, Student at thePennsylvania State University, Chemical Engineering

Major. This girl was walking home, looked like. . .

from a shirt from college, looked like a collegesweatshirt, and she was going back to her apart-ment, looked like. And she/you know. . . normalday, she got her mail, came up, sat down, saw a let-ter, I guess it stood out ‘cause she opened it first.The letter was obviously bad news because shelooked pretty upset from the way she was holdingher head and her face/facial expressions. I thinkit was a bill, looked like a bill, because. . . some-thing about size. Didn’t look like a. . . she had likeenough time to read like a letter. So I’m guessingit was like a bill she couldn’t pay, a credit card orschool. That really upset her. The she looked atit again because she didn’t want to believe it orhad to take a second look at it. Then it looked likeher roommate came out and saw she was upset.Maybe she asked her why she was upset and thenshe picked up the letter to see what was wrongand the girl who/that was upset took the letterback kind of angry because she didn’t want herlooking at her mail, her business. And so maybeit could have meant it was something besides thebill. And then she just stormed off, the roommatesat down . . . I think she was just upset, just wantedto go and worry about it herself. Didn’t want totalk about it. I think she just wanted to go some-where to figure out what she was going to do.

L2 Learner Corpus: Brandon, 20 Years Old,Advanced American Learner of Russian, Student atthe Middlebury Russian Summer School, Interna-tional Affairs Major. Mne ka�ets� qto . . . zimo�mo�et byt� . . . pozdno . . . osen�� i . . . est��enwina, ona xla po ulice sredi tipiqnogora�ona v Amerike, mne kazalos�. I prixladomo�, ona poluqila/a ona poluqila po-qtu, i ona otkryla i pis�ma tam qto-togrustnoe. � ne zna� qto. No mne ka�ets�mo�et byt� ona . . . ona vygl�dela . . .dl�vozrasta kak VUZa i navernoe mo�et byt��to . . . pis�mo iz universiteta . . . v kotoromoni . . . otkazali ee mo�et byt�. to, �totipiqny� rasskaz v VUZe v Amerike . . .Ooo,� ne postupila v �konomi�! � ne stanubogatym! � ne stanu . . .to vsegda by-vaet. to oqen� va�no. Koneqno, sovsem neva�noe v Amerike gde ty uqils�, no stu-denty vsegda oqen� bo�ts�, oqen� smexno.No duma� �to, qto sluqilos� . . .mo�etbyt� ee sestra, mo�et byt� ee mat�/eel�bovnica, � ne zna�, ona prixla v kom-natu i . . . podoxla k �enwine s pis�momto�e napisala i druga� �enwina ona nestala . . . grustno�. Ona vygl�dela kak onasoqust . . . soqust, soqustvovala . . .drugo��enwine i duma� qto �to bylo kak . . .


otka-zy-va-�wee . . . pis�mo . . .dl� per-vogo/dl� pervo� �enwiny, no � ne sovsempon�l i potom �to vse. . . .mo�et byt� onahotela, ona oqen� grustna�, ona prostohotela byt� odin/odna, mo�et byt�, imo�et byt� �to bylo, � ne zna�, mo�et byt��to bylo qto-to . . .drugo� �enwine, i � nezna�, i ona stala serdits� k ne�/serdito� kne�.

It seems to me that [it is] . . . wintermaybe . . . late . . . fall and . . . there is a woman,she was walking down the street on a typical Americanblock, it seemed to me. And [she] came home, shereceived/she received [her] mail, and she opened andletters and there was something sad there. I don’t knowwhat. But it seems to me that maybe she . . . she lookedlike . . . college-age and maybe it is . . . a letter from auniversity . . . where they . . . rejected her maybe. This,this is a typical story with colleges in America . . . Ooh,I didn’t get into economics! I won’t become rich! Iwon’t . . . This always happens. It is very important.Of course, it is not important in America whereyou studied but students always fear, very funny.But I think that’s what happened . . . maybe hersister, maybe her mother/her lover, I don’t know,she came into the room and . . . came over to thewoman with the letter also wrote and the otherwoman she did not become . . . sad. She looked like sheempa . . . empa/empathized. . . [with] the other womanand I think it was like a . . . re-jec-tion . . . letter . . . forthe first, for the first woman, but I did not completelyunderstand and that’s it . . . maybe she wanted/shewas very sad, she wanted to be alone/alone, maybe,and maybe it was, I don’t know, maybe it wassomething . . . the other woman, and I don’t know,and she became angry, angry towards her.

We now turn to the results of the quantita-tive and qualitative analyses of the three corpora.

Monolingual Corpora

Quantitative Analysis. A Kolmogorov-Smirnovtest revealed that all of our data were normally dis-

TABLE 1Size and Lexical Richness in the Narrative Corpora

Number of Lexical RichnessNumber Emotion Emotion of the Emotionof Words Lemmas Word Tokens Lexicon (TTR)

Russian corpus 5,959 51 216 0.24N = 49 M = 121.6 M = 1.04 M = 4.4English corpus 8,665 36 277 0.13N = 50 M = 173.3 M = 0.72 M = 5.5American learner corpus 6,700 36 159 0.23N = 30 M = 223.3 M = 1.2 M = 5.3

tributed for narrative length, proportion of emo-tion tokens, and proportions of morphosyntacticcategories. We, therefore, analyzed the data usingparametric statistics, including independent sam-ple t -tests, analyses of variance (ANOVA), mul-tivariate analyses of variance (MANOVA), andScheffe posthoc analyses. We first discuss the in-fluence of the independent variables (native lan-guage, gender, and socioeconomic background)on narrative length and the proportion of emo-tion tokens in the corpora. We then examine theinfluence of these variables on the distributionof emotion words across morphosyntactic cate-gories. These dependent variables are well estab-lished: Narrative length has been used in previousresearch on productivity (Dewaele & Pavlenko,2003), and proportions of morphosyntactic cat-egories have been analyzed in Dewaele (1996,2001).

Table 1 summarizes the comparison of the cor-pora in terms of size and lexical richness of emo-tion vocabulary. In terms of narrative length, wefound significant differences between the Russianand American monolinguals (t = 5.02, df = 91,p < .0001), with the American group producinglonger extracts (M = 173.3 words, SD = 57.9) thanthe Russian group (M = 121.6 words, SD = 43.8),despite the fact that articles were not included inthe word count. An ANOVA revealed a main ef-fect for group (American monolinguals, Russianmonolinguals, and American learners of Russian)with respect to narrative length (F = 25.1, df =2,126, p < .0001, eta2 = .285). Scheffe posthocanalysis revealed significant differences amongthe three groups (all p < .003), with the learn-ers’ narratives being significantly longer than themonolinguals’ narratives. We will return to thisdifference in our discussion of the learner data.

In terms of emotion vocabulary, the overallnumber of emotion word tokens was somewhathigher in the English narratives than in the Rus-sian ones (277 vs. 216), but there were no sig-nificant differences between Russian and English


TABLE 2Gender in the Narrative Corpora

Number of Number of Lexical RichnessNumber of Emotion Emotion of the Emotion

Words Lemmas Word Tokens Lexicon (TTR)

American females (n = 25) 4,290 23 136 0.17M = 171.6 M = 0.92 M = 5.44

American males (n = 25) 4,375 28 141 0.20M = 175 M = 1.12 M = 5.64

Russian females (n = 31) 3,827 40 151 0.26M = 123.5 M = 1.29 M = 4.9

Russian males (n = 18) 2,132 32 65 0.49M = 118.4 M = 1.78 M = 3.6

American learners, females (n = 15) 3,540 29 87 0.33M = 236 M = 1.93 M = 5.8

American learners, males (n = 15) 3,160 20 72 0.28M = 210.7 M = 1.33 M = 4.8

monolinguals in terms of the proportion of emo-tion tokens (t = –1.58, df = 97, p > .05). Thelexical richness of the emotion lexicon, measuredthrough type/token ratio, was higher in the Rus-sian corpus (0.24 vs. 0.13), with Russian speak-ers using a wider variety of emotion lemmas thanAmerican English speakers (51 vs. 36).

Table 2 summarizes the results in terms of theinfluence of gender. Gender did not show anyeffect on narrative length either in English (t =–.21, df = 47, p > .05) or in Russian (t = .38,df = 47, p > .05). In terms of the proportion ofemotion tokens, no gender differences emergedin the English corpus (t = .37, df = 48, p > .05);Russian-speaking women, however, used a signifi-cantly larger proportion of emotion tokens thanRussian-speaking men (t = 2.72, df = 24.7, p <

.01). These inconsistent results suggest that gen-der may not directly influence the size and useof emotion vocabulary or narrative length. Thisoutcome is not surprising: Owing to multiple con-textual influences on ways in which speakers of

TABLE 3Socioeducational Background in the Narrative Corpora

Number of Number of Lexical RichnessNumber of Emotion Emotion Word of the Emotion

Words Lemmas Tokens Lexicon (TTR)

University of St. Petersburg (n = 20) 2,621 34 98 0.35M = 131.1 M = 1.7 M = 4.9

Tomsk State University (n = 29) 3,338 36 118 0.31M = 115.1 M = 1.2 M = 4.1

Cornell University (n = 20) 3,359 26 130 0.20M = 168 M = 1.3 M = 6.5

Pennsylvania State University (n = 30) 5,306 27 147 0.18M = 177 M = 0.9 M = 4.9

different languages perform gender, gender can-not influence language performance in a uniformmanner (see also Dewaele & Pavlenko, 2002; Lutz,1996; Shimanoff, 1983).

Table 3 summarizes the results in terms of theuniversity type, which was taken here to representsocioeducational background. No differences innarrative length were found within the Ameri-can corpus between the groups from Cornell andPenn State (t = –.53, df = 48, p > .05), norwithin the Russian corpus between the groupsfrom Tomsk and St. Petersburg (t = 1.26, df = 47,p > .05). In terms of the proportion of emotiontokens, a difference emerged within the Amer-ican corpus between the students from Cornelland Penn State (t = 2.72, df = 24.7, p < .012). Nosuch difference emerged in the Russian corpus.

Let us now consider the influence of the in-dependent variables on the distribution of emo-tion words across morphosyntactic categories.Table 4 summarizes the group results, andFigure 1 illustrates the results graphically. We can


TABLE 4Morphosyntactic Categories in the Emotion Vocabulary

Nouns Adjectives Verbs Adverbs Total

Russian corpus (n = 49) 22% 24% 51% 3% n = 216n = 47 n = 52 n = 110 n = 7

English corpus (n = 50) 6% 75% 18% 1% n = 277n = 16 n = 209 n = 49 n = 3

American learner corpus (n = 30) 11% 26% 48.5% 14.5% n = 159n = 18 n = 41 n = 77 n = 23

see that speakers of Russian and English differedin the preferred pattern of emotion coding inretellings of The Letter . English speakers favoredemotion adjectives (75% of all emotion word to-kens), whereas Russian speakers favored emotionverbs (51% of all emotion word tokens). Thesepatterns also held within the subcorpora. Adjec-tives accounted for 70% of all emotion words inthe Cornell corpus and for 80% in the Penn Statecorpus. Verbs accounted for 46% of all emotionwords in the St. Petersburg corpus and for 55% inthe Tomsk corpus. It is interesting that the dom-inant patterns were stronger in the corpora withlower lexical richness, which suggests to us thatspeakers with more limited lexicons may appealto more predictable lexical choices.

FIGURE 1Comparison Between English L1, Russian L2, and Russian L1

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

Nouns Adjectives Verbs Adverbs

Prop

orti

on o

f Em

otio

n T

oken

s (%

)

English L1 (n = 50)Russian L2 (n = 30)Russian L1 (n = 49)

No significant influences of gender or socioe-conomic background emerged in the analysis ofmorphosyntactic categories (all p > .05), but therewas a significant effect of the native language. AMANOVA revealed a significant main effect ofgroup membership on the proportions of mor-phosyntactic categories (Wilks lambda = .35, F= 21.5, df = 4,123, p < .0001, eta2 = .412). Ac-cording to the criteria set out by Cohen (1992),the amount of variance (41.2%) explained by themodel is indicative of a large effect size. The anal-ysis of between-subjects effects suggests that thegroup effect was strongest for adjectives (F =80.7, p < .0001, eta2 = .562), followed by verbs(F = 30.0, p < .0001, eta2 = .322), nouns (F =14.0, p < .0001, eta2 = .188), and adverbs


TABLE 5Multiple Comparisons (Scheffe) BetweenProportions of Emotion Nouns, Adjectives, Verbs,and Adverbs Selected by English Monolinguals(EL1), Russian Monolinguals (RL1), and AmericanLearners of Russian (RL2)

Dependent MeanVariable GROUP GROUP Difference SE α

EL1 RL1 −19.3 3.7 .0001Nouns RL2 EL1 4.7 4.2 ns

RL2 RL1 −14.6 4.2 .003EL1 RL1 59.9 5.0 .0001

Adjectives RL2 EL1 −53.1 5.8 .0001RL2 RL1 6.8 5.8 nsEL1 RL1 −37.9 5.3 .0001

Verbs RL2 EL1 35.1 6.1 .0001RL2 RL1 −2.8 6.1 nsEL1 RL1 −3.0 2.5 ns

Adverbs RL2 EL1 14.0 2.9 .0001RL2 RL1 11.0 2.9 .001

(F = 12, p < .0001, eta2 = .165). Scheffe posthoctests, summarized in Table 5, show significant dif-ferences between the two monolingual groups intheir use of adjectives, verbs, and nouns, but not ofadverbs.

Qualitative Analysis. We also analyzed the cor-pora in terms of the actual lexical choices thespeakers made. Analysis of the English corpus re-vealed a high level of agreement concerning iden-tification of the main protagonist’s emotions: 45out of 50 participants described the woman withthe adjective upset in combination with the copulaverbs to be , to get , and to become , as in Example 5.

Example 5

she was really frustrated, upset. . .

she got really upset when she read the letter. . .

she became very upset that her friend was lookingthrough her mail. . .

Altogether, the word upset appeared 119 timesin the English corpus and accounted for 43%of the emotion word corpus (see Appendix A).Among other frequently used words were theemotion adjectives angry (24 tokens, 9% of theemotion word corpus), mad (16 tokens, 5.8%),and sad (10 tokens, 3.6%), as well as the verb tocry (15 tokens, 5.4%). These choices suggest thatthe participants perceived the female protagonistboth as sad and angry, either simultaneously or atdifferent points in the film.

The Russian speakers also saw the youngwoman as upset and used two translation equiv-

alents of the adjective upset to refer to her,the verb rasstraivat�s� (rasstraivat’sia) (43 to-kens, 20% of the emotion word corpus) and theadjective rasstroenna� (rasstroennaia) (24 to-kens, 11%). Example 6 illustrates the use of thesewords.

Example 6

Qi/qita� pis�mo, ona rasstraivaets�, vi-dat�, �to byla . . . ne oqen� horoxa� novost�dl� nee, ona oqen� rasstroilas�.

‘Re/reading the letter, she is becoming up-set (rasstraivaetsia, present tense/imperfective),looks like it was . . . not very good news forher, she got really upset (rasstroilas’, pasttense/perfective).’

Together with the corresponding nounrasstro�stvo (rasstroistvo), these choices ac-counted for 32% of the emotion word corpus.Rasstraivat’sia is not the only frequently usedverb—the other two popular choices are pere�i-vat� (perezhivat’) ‘to suffer, to worry, to expe-rience something keenly’ (18 tokens, 8% of theemotion word corpus) and plakat� ‘to cry’ (10tokens, 4.6%). As noted earlier, perezhivat’ is alanguage-specific word that does not have an ex-act translation equivalent in English. As a verb, itcan be used in all three tenses (past, present, andfuture) but only in an imperfective aspect; its per-fective counterpart, pere�it� (perezhit’), means‘to survive, to live through’. The verb rasstrai-vat�s� (rasstraivat’sia) also has a perfective equiv-alent rasstroit�s� (rasstroit’sia), which refers toa completed action whose result is still in effect.The imperfective verb can be used in all threetenses, but the perfective one only in the past andfuture tenses.

Example 7 shows that Russian speakers usedthese verbs in conjunction with tense and aspectmarkers to discuss processes that have a clear start-ing point (e.g., naqinaet rasstraivat�s� ‘be-gins to be upset’, ona oqen� rasstroilas� ‘shegot very upset’) and duration (ona pere�ivaet‘she is worrying/suffering’, ona sidela pere�i-vala ‘she was sitting [and] worrying/suffering’).What is particularly interesting is that Rus-sian speakers often used the verbs perezhi-vat’ and rasstraivat’sia/rasstroit’sia together todescribe a sequence of emotion actions orprocesses.

Example 7

Vidimo, pis�mo ne oqen� pri�tnoe, po-tomu qto devuxka naqinaet rasstraivat�s�,pere�ivaet.


‘It looks like the letter is not a very pleasantone, because the woman is beginning [to begetting] upset (rasstraivat’sia, present tense/imperfective), [she is] worrying/suffering(perezhivaet, present tense/imperfective).’

. . . vidimo, pis�mo bylo . . . peqal�nogosoder�ani�, potomu qto ona sil�norasstroilas�. Nu pokazano kak ona pere�i-vaet . . .

‘ . . . apparently, the letter had . . . sad con-tents, because she got really upset (rasstroilas’,past tense/perfective). So it shows how sheis worrying/suffering (perezhivaet , presenttense/imperfective). . .’

. . . proqitav �to pis�mo, ona oqen�rasstroilas�. Vidimo, tam bylo nepri�tnoeizvestie. I sid� v svoe� komnate,razmyxl��, v obwem, ona oqen� pere�i-vala.

‘ . . . having read this letter, she got really up-set (rasstroilas’, past tense/perfective). Lookslike it contained some unpleasant news. Andsitting in her room, thinking, well, shewas really worrying/suffering (perezhivala, pasttense/imperfective).’

. . . po-vidimomu, pis�mo ee qem-to rasstroilo, ona sidela pere�ivala . . .

‘ . . . apparently, the letter upset (rasstroilo, pasttense/perfective) her somehow, she was sit-ting [and] worrying/suffering (perezhivala, pasttense) . . . ’

The switch from one verb to another allowsspeakers to shift from perfective (rasstroit’sia) tothe imperfective aspect (perezhivat’), to differenti-ate between the starting point of a particular pro-cess (rasstroilas� ‘got upset’) and the action inprogress (pere�ivaet ‘is worrying/suffering’),and also to avoid repetition. This aspect-relatedusage mirrors the use of these two verbs in con-temporary literary and colloquial Russian, as il-lustrated in the following quotation, taken froma recent novel by a bestselling Russian writer ofmurder mysteries, Aleksandra Marinina (2005):

Mne stydno, qto � svoim povedeniem zastavilego tak sil�no pere�ivat�. I pust� ego pere�i-vani� ka�uts� mne nepravil�nymi, mne vseravno stydno, i se�qas � gotov na vse, lix� by onperestal rasstraivat�s�. (p. 132) ‘I am ashamedthat my behavior made him suffer/worry (perezhivat’)so much. Even if his worries/feelings (perezhivania)seem wrong to me, I am still ashamed, and now I amready to do anything so that he would stop being soupset (rasstraivat’sia).’

What we see then is that, although for themost part Russian and English speakers agreedon the emotions they wanted to describe, Englishspeakers described them predominantly with ad-jectives, such as upset , and Russian speakers pre-dominantly with verbs, such as rasstraivat’sia andperezhivat’ . There were also some discrepanciesin terms of how the two groups perceived thewoman’s state. English speakers saw her not onlyas sad but also as angry, with the total of 47 wordtokens for anger (2), angry (24), furious (1), mad(16), pissed off (2), and angrily (2) accounting for17% of the emotion word corpus. Russian speak-ers, on the other hand, used only 9 emotion wordtokens describing anger (4% of the corpus), withno agreement on any single word (for a list ofall the words, see the next section and AppendixB). This low frequency and the lack of agreementsuggest that ‘angry’ was not a dominant interpre-tation in the Russian corpus.

To sum up, using quantitative and qualitativeanalyses, we identified five important differencesbetween the two monolingual corpora. First, theydiffered significantly in terms of mean narrativelength: English monolinguals produced longernarratives than Russian speakers. Second, they dif-fered in terms of lexical richness: Russian speak-ers displayed higher lexical richness of emotionvocabulary than speakers of American English.Third, they differed in the distribution of emo-tion terms across morphosyntactic categories: En-glish speakers favored an adjectival pattern ofemotion description and Russian speakers a ver-bal one, as would be predicted by Wierzbicka,(1992). Fourth, the two groups differed somewhatin terms of lexical choices. English speakers fa-vored an emotion adjective upset with a range ofcopula verbs. In turn, Russian speakers describedthe same character using the adjective rasstroen-naia, which corresponds to upset , but also twointransitive verbs, rasstraivat’sia and perezhivat’ ,which worked in tandem to mark aspect and todescribe a sequence of emotion actions or pro-cesses. Fifth, the two groups differed somewhat intheir interpretations of the main character’s emo-tions: Americans were more likely to see the maincharacter as angry or mad , in addition to beingupset or sad . Let us now see how advanced Amer-ican learners of Russian performed on the sametask.

American Learner Corpus

Quantitative Analysis. As we discussed earlier,American learners produced significantly longernarratives than either monolingual group (seeTable 1). It appears that the learners did not align


exactly with either monolingual group in this task;rather, they behaved as L2 learners or users. Themonolingual participants saw the task as a recalland performed it easily in their native languages.In contrast, the learners interviewed in their L2may have suspected that the quality of their per-formance would also be subject to judgment andmay have tried to impress the researcher by dis-playing their ability in Russian. The length of theirnarratives was further affected by the fact that, tonavigate lexical gaps, they had to resort to para-phrasing and circumlocution.

Despite the increased length, the learners’ nar-ratives contained a smaller proportion of emotionword tokens than the monolinguals’ narratives.An ANOVA revealed a significant main effect ofgroup for the proportion of emotion tokens (F =9.1, df = 2,126, p < .0001, eta2 = .127). Theeffect size was small (see Cohen, 1992). Scheffeposthoc analyses revealed a significant differencebetween the learners and the English monolin-guals (p < .021), as well as between the learnersand the Russian monolinguals (p < .0001). It ap-pears, therefore, that the L2 learners used feweremotion words than the monolingual speakers.Nevertheless, the lexical richness of emotion vo-cabulary in the learner corpus (0.23) was higherthan that in the English corpus (0.13) and sim-ilar to that in the Russian corpus (0.24). Thesenumbers suggest that the learners had a rich va-riety of emotion words at their disposal. Gen-der, as discussed in the previous section, was nota consistent influence across the corpora, andthe influence of the socioeducational backgroundcould not be examined in the learner corpussince all the narratives were collected at a singleinstitution.

Figure 1 and Table 4 show that, in terms of theirmorphosyntactic choices, the learners conformedto the native Russian pattern in using more verbs(48.5%) than adjectives (26%) in their narratives.Table 5 shows that the L2 learners differed fromthe monolingual English speakers in their use ofadjectives, verbs, and adverbs, but not of nouns.They were similar to the Russian monolingualsin their use of adjectives and verbs, but differedfrom them in the use of nouns and adverbs. Inother words, with respect to the use of adverbs,the L2 learners differed from both monolingualgroups. Let us now consider these results from aqualitative standpoint.

Qualitative Analysis. As was seen in Table 4, de-spite the lack of significant differences, there wasgrowth in the proportion of emotion nouns used

in the American learner corpus (11%), as com-pared to the monolingual English corpus (6%).This growth may suggest that the learners arebeginning to internalize the Russian pattern ofdescribing emotions through nominal construc-tions. The analysis of the lexical choices by thelearners (see Appendix C) indicates that theyused some of the same nouns that native speak-ers of Russian did (Appendix B)—nastroenie‘mood’, neudovol�stvie ‘discontent’, otqa�nie‘despair’, sosto�nie ‘state’, quvstva ‘feelings’,and �mocii ‘emotions’—and sometimes in sim-ilar constructions, for example, ona byla votqa�nii ‘she was in despair’.

In some cases, however, the learners exhibitedthe mastery of the appropriate nouns but not ofcollocations or morphosyntactic constructions inwhich the nouns appeared, and used the verbbyt� ‘to be’ instead of the more appropriate butless frequent verbs, such as ispytyvat� ‘to expe-rience’ or ohvatyvat� ‘to grasp/seize’, as seen inExample 8.

Example 8

u nee byla strah

‘she had fear’ (It would be more appropriate tosay ee ohvatil strah ‘she was grasped by fear’or e� bylo straxno ‘it was scary to her’.)

The dominance of verbs compared to adjectivesin the learners’ narratives similarly suggests thatthe learners are beginning to internalize the Rus-sian preference for the verbal pattern over theadjectival one. The learners used some of thesame verbs that native speakers of Russian did:bespokoit�s� ‘to worry’, (za-)plakat� ‘to cry, tobegin crying’, obidet�s� ‘to take offense, to feelhurt [by someone]’, ogorqat�(-s�) ‘to be pained,annoyed’, rasstraivat�s� ‘to get upset’, so-quvstvovat� ‘to empathize’, udivl�t� ‘to sur-prise’, and uspokoit�(-s�) ‘to calm down’. Somelearners sounded native-like in the way they de-scribed the protagonist’s feelings through verbs,as illustrated in Example 9.

Example 9

Ona proqitala �to pis�mo, ka�ets�, qto v�tom pis�me byla kaka�-to ploha� novost�.Ona zaplakala, oqen� rasstroilas� . . .

‘She read the letter, it seems that the letter con-tained some bad news. She began crying, got veryupset (rasstroilas’ , past tense/perfective).’

�sno, qto v nem qto-to nepri/nepri�tnoe. . . napisano, nu potomu qto ona sil�no


rasstroilas�. Ona ne zaplakala, ka�ets�,qto ona rasserdilas� . . .

‘It is clear that there is something un-plea/unpleasant in it . . . written, because she gotreally upset (rasstroilas’ , past tense/perfective).She didn’t start crying, it seemed that she got an-gry . . .’

Nevertheless, several learners transferred theadjectival pattern from their L1 English into Rus-sian. In contexts in which the L1 Russian speak-ers would use intransitive reflexive emotion verbs,such as rasserdit�s� ‘to get cross/angry atsomeone’ or rasstroit�s� ‘to get upset’, theseL2 learners opted for emotion adjectives pre-ceded by change-of-state verbs stat� (perfec-tive)/stanovit�s� (imperfective) ‘to become’,as seen in Example 10.

Example 10

ona byla serdito�/serdita‘she was angry/angry’ [changes case endings]

ona stala serdito�‘she became angry’

ona uxla potomu, qto ona byla oqen�serdita�, mne ka�ets�, i oqen� grustna�‘she left because she was very angry, it seems tome, and very sad’

ona qitala pis�mo, i ona stala oqen� grust-no�‘she was reading the letter, and she became verysad’

druga� �enwina ona ne stala . . . grustno�.Ona vygl�dela kak ona soqust/soqust/soqustvovala . . .drugo� �enwine. . .‘the other woman she did not become . . .sad.She looked like she empa/empa/empathized. . .

[with] the other woman . . .’

perva� devuxka . . . (2.0) . . . nu vot kak stalarasstroena, i ona uxla‘the first girl . . . (2.0) . . . so she became upset, andshe left’

As we previously noted, in English, utterancescontaining pronouns, state or change-of-stateverbs, and emotion adjectives (Pro + Verb + Adj[Nominative]) are fully grammatical and fairlycommon. Russian, on the other hand, favors emo-tion verbs in similar contexts. It is quite unusual tohear or see constructions such as Pro + Verb + Adj(Instrumental) (e.g., ona stala grustno� ‘shebecame sad’). Yet the students transposed the En-glish pattern onto Russian, producing instances

of morphosyntactic transfer. During the debrief-ing session, several students stated that they werenot aware of the fact that Russian favors emo-tion verbs, whereas English speakers prefer ad-jectives. Although it is entirely possible that theymay have learned and forgotten this fact, our anal-ysis of a corpus of Russian textbooks revealed thatthese differences were not mentioned in the texts(Pavlenko & Driagina, 2006).

Another interesting discrepancy between verbchoices of native speakers of Russian and Ameri-can learners of Russian was the complete absenceof the verb perezhivat’ in the learner corpus. We ar-gue that even though several Russian textbooks in-troduce this verb, its absence in spontaneous pro-duction is not surprising. Both the verb rasstrai-vat’sia and its corresponding adjective, rasstroen-nyi, map in the learners’ mental lexicons onto afamiliar notion of getting upset, whereas the verbperezhivat’ has neither a structural, in other wordsadjectival, nor a semantic counterpart in English,and is thus harder to acquire. In the debriefingsession, the learners acknowledged that they hadseen the verb before but were not aware of itshigh frequency and salience in Russian emotiondiscourse and had not learned how to use thisverb in everyday communication.

Another discrepancy was evident in seman-tic choices made by the American learners andthe native speakers of Russian. The learnersdemonstrated greater consistency in describingthe woman as angry and stating that she waseither serdita� ‘angry/cross’ (7 tokens) orrasserdilas� ‘got cross, angry at someone’ (17tokens). The uses of lemmas in the semanticfield of serdit�s� (serdit’sia) ‘to be experienc-ing anger/to be cross with someone’ accountedfor 16% of the emotion words in the learner cor-pus. This performance was consistent with thatof the monolingual English speakers (17% of theemotion word corpus) and suggests that the learn-ers tended to interpret emotions in culturally spe-cific ways. This is especially striking since noneof the words in the field of serdit’sia were usedby native speakers of Russian. A few participantsmentioned that the woman experienced dosada‘annoyance’ (2 tokens), zlost� ‘anger, malice,spite’ (1 token), that she was vozmuwena (-na�)‘indignant’ (2 tokens), razdra�ena ‘irritated’ (1token), or that the letter angered her, zlit� ‘toanger’ (1 token) and she got angry, razozlit�s�‘to get angry/irritated’ (1 token) and was behav-ing in an angry manner, razgnevanno ‘in wrath, inire’ (1 token). Importantly, however, there was noagreement between the speakers on these choices.


This difference in interpretation betweenAmericans (monolinguals and L2 learners) andRussians does not mean that Americans saw angerwhere there was none. Rather, what we see is across-linguistic difference in categorization of par-ticular verbal and nonverbal behaviors. Englishspeakers categorized the protagonist’s behaviorsas a display of ‘anger’. Russian speakers, on theother hand, did not see these behaviors as a dis-play of serdit’sia ‘to be cross/angry at someone’.A few, however, used lexical items in the field ofzlit’sia ‘to be experiencing anger’, revealing dif-ferences between serdit’sia, a relational process in-volving another person or people, and zlit’sia, aprocess that may have abstract causes. The learn-ers, however, have mapped the Russian termsserdit’sia and serdita� (serditaia) ‘angry/crossat someone’ directly onto angry in their mentallexicons, without differentiating between serdit’siaand zlit’sia, and, in so doing, displayed conceptualtransfer.

An intriguing difference between the learnersand the monolingual speakers (both Russian andEnglish) involved the uses of adverbs. As seen inTables 4 and 5, the learners significantly overusedadverbs, as compared to monolingual speakers(14.5% in the learner corpus vs. 3% in the Rus-sian corpus and 1% in the English corpus). Theremay be two reasons for this overuse. The first rea-son is L1 transfer because adverbial constructionsallow learners to use state and change-of-stateverbs in ways similar to adjectival constructions.The second reason, suggested by our analysis ofcurrent Russian textbooks and by debriefing ses-sions with the learners, is textbook and classroomemphasis on impersonal constructions with predi-cate adverbs. Learners are taught—and justly so—that impersonal constructions are a common wayof talking about one’s own and others’ feelings,moods, and attitudes. However, Russian has twocompeting patterns of describing emotions, onewith subjects as agents and one with subjects aspassive experiencers. Native speakers of Russianopted for the active pattern in the context of thistask, whereas several learners overgeneralized im-personal constructions to contexts in which theywere not used by native speakers of Russian, asseen in Example 11.

Example 11

e� stala grustno . . . e� bylo st/obidno‘it became sad to her . . . it was sh/hurtful to her’

e� ne bylo tak sqastlivo‘it wasn’t so happy to her’ [semantically inappro-priate]

oqevidno e� oqen� ploho‘it is clear that she is unwell’

ona qitala odno pis�mo i �to bylo oqen�grustno‘she was reading one letter and it was very sad’ [Itis not clear what was sad, the letter or the sight ofthe woman reading it.]

Some learners also differed from the nativespeakers of Russian in the sociolinguistic appro-priateness of their lexical choices. These learnersappealed to choices sanctioned in their textbooksand classrooms that are either too literary or toostrong for the context of this particular task, suchas koxmar ‘nightmare’ or u�as ‘horror’. Theyalso appealed to an inappropriately high liter-ary register when using emotion expressions andemotion metaphors, as seen in Example 12.

Example 12

mne ka�ets� qto kak serdce ne razbilo . . .‘it seems to me that is like heart is not broken’

dl� pervu� devuxku otkryt� svo� duxu . . .‘for the first girl to open her soul’

Finally, we found evidence of systematic diffi-culties with lexical retrieval and morphosyntacticchoices in the area of emotion vocabulary. Thesedifficulties were evident in the following verbaland nonverbal behaviors:

1. An increased amount of pausing, hesita-tion, and false starts in sentences that describe theprotagonist’s feelings; we see several such pausesand false starts in Brandon’s narrative, for exam-ple, one ne stala . . . grustno� ‘she didn’t be-come . . . sad’, ona hotela/ona oqen� grustna�‘she wanted/she is very sad’.

2. Laughter in the context of pauses and falsestarts when attempting to use emotion words.Such laughter is commonly used to cover up thefeeling of discomfort about one’s proficiency.

3. Questions to the interviewer about thecorrect form and meaning of Russian emotionwords, for example, “ona rasserdilas�, da?”‘she got cross/angry, yes?’; “ona abitsa? onaabilas�?” ‘she upset? she got upset?’ [the stu-dent mispronounced the word obidet�s� ‘tobe hurt/offended by someone’]; “to pravda,utexit� ee?” ‘It is true, to comfort her?’

4. An increased appeal to alternative meansof emotion description, such as exaggerated in-tonation, body language, repetition (e.g., onaplakala, plakala ‘she was crying, crying’), anddirect speech (e.g., “Qto sluqilos�? Poqemutebe ploho?” ‘What happened? Why are you


unwell?’), not used by native speakers of Russianin the context of this task.

5. Lexical borrowing in contexts in which thelearners perceived lexical lacunae in their emo-tion vocabulary, as is the case with the word frus-tration that, as discussed earlier, lacks a Russiantranslation equivalent. Example 13 illustrates suchborrowing.

Example 13

mo�et byt�, u nee frustraci� kaka�-to, nezna�‘maybe, she had some frustration, I don’t know’

u nee byla frustraci�‘she had frustration’

ne prosto grustnee, no kak qto-to ee fras-triruet/frastrirovalo‘not simply sadder, but something is frustratingher, frustrated’

In sum, advanced American learners of Rus-sian in our study were beginning to approximatenative speakers of Russian in terms of the lexi-cal richness of their emotion vocabulary and mor-phosyntactic and lexical choices, shifting from thepreference for an adjectival pattern of emotiondescription in English to a verbal one in Rus-sian. At the same time, we uncovered six differ-ences between the monolingual Russian corpusand the learner corpus: (a) L1 morphosyntactictransfer of the adjectival pattern; (b) L1 concep-tual transfer of the usage of adjectives and verbsin the field of serdit’sia ‘to be cross/angry at some-one’; (c) overuse of adverbial constructions, par-tially explained by L1 transfer and partially byinstruction effects; (d) the absence of the verbperezhivat’ ‘to suffer, to worry, to experience some-thing keenly’, frequently used by native speakersof Russian; (e) violations of appropriateness of so-ciolinguistic register; and (f) a significantly lowerproportion of emotion word tokens in the learnercorpus. This last result may be explained by theoverall difficulties learners experience with emo-tion vocabulary. Indirect evidence of difficultiesin retrieval of emotion words was seen in paus-ing, laughter, paraphrasing, and circumlocutions,and also in lexical borrowing and questions to theinterviewer.

CONCLUSIONS

We hope that our discussion has revealed theadvantages of contrastive learner corpus analysisand of the uses of narratives in the study of ad-vanced learner proficiency. This approach allows

us to hold the semantic referent constant and toelicit comparable language samples from a varietyof speakers. The corpora, in turn, make it possi-ble to identify a range of lexical choices made withregard to a particular referent by native speakersof the language in question. Thus, the answer tothe question “What would a native speaker say inthis context?” becomes an empirical, rather thana hypothetical, one. Then, we can examine lexicalchoices in the learner corpora and, because thedata are narrative, understand the contributionsof semantic, pragmatic, and structural factors tolexical selection in the mental lexicon.

Our findings show that the advanced Americanlearners of Russian who participated in the studyhad rich emotion vocabularies and displayed skill-ful uses of emotion words in all morphosyntacticcategories. Many of their lexical and morphosyn-tactic choices approximated those of native speak-ers of Russian. These learners also internalized theRussian preference for emotion verbs over adjec-tives. They nevertheless continued experiencingdifficulties in describing the emotions of othersand, as a consequence, differed from the nativespeakers of Russian in their morphosyntactic, se-mantic, and register choices. Our findings identi-fied two verbs as particularly difficult for the learn-ers, the intransitive verb perezhivat’ ‘to suffer, toworry, to experience something keenly’ and theintransitive reflexive and relational verb serdit’sia‘to be cross/angry at someone’. Perezhivat’ is dif-ficult because it lacks a semantic equivalent in En-glish and does not have a corresponding adjectivein Russian, which might have facilitated internal-ization. Serdit’sia is difficult because it refers to anarrow set of meanings. The learners mapped itonto a partial translation equivalent, angry, thatcorresponds to a much broader concept.

These findings have implications both for ourunderstanding of the structure of the bilingualmental lexicon and for FL instruction. With re-gard to the mental lexicon, we found that in theprocess of FL acquisition learners can shift thepattern of their structural choices; the L2 learn-ers here replaced their preference for adjectiveswith one for verbs. Structural preferences fromthe L1 may nevertheless continue to influencelexical selections in the L2, as was evident inthe transfer of the adjectival pattern from En-glish into Russian. Furthermore, the acquisitionof the language-specific verb perezhivat’ seemedto be complicated by the lack of a correspondingadjective. Together, these results point to cross-linguistic influence that affects both lexical selec-tion in the L2 mental lexicon and the acquisitionof L2 emotion vocabulary.


Our results were similar to Pavlenko’s (2002b)finding that Russian–English bilinguals transferthe adjectival pattern from L2 English into L1 Rus-sian. We have two converging explanations for thesimilarity between the transfer patterns in the twostudies. The first explanation is the dominance ofEnglish in both sets of participants: the Americanlearners of Russian in this study and the Russiansliving in the United States in Pavlenko’s (2002b)study. The second explanation involves the lexicaloptions offered by Russian emotion vocabulary.Russian facilitates the “transfer to somewhere”(Kellerman, 1995, p. 126), or transfer-inducedovergeneralization of contexts in which the adjec-tival pattern is appropriate. Transfer in the otherdirection is rendered virtually impossible by thelow number of intransitive emotion verbs in En-glish.

Our analysis revealed both system-wide anditem-specific cross-linguistic effects in the men-tal lexicon. System-wise, we identified a structuralshift from the L1 to the L2 pattern occurringin the lexicon of advanced American learners ofRussian, as well as negative L1 transfer, evidentin the use of emotion adverbs and adjectives.Item-wise, we identified several emotion verbsthat represent particular difficulties for Americanlearners, such as serdit’sia and perezhivat’ . The lat-ter findings revealed three patterns of mappingbetween concepts and lemmas in the learner lex-icon. Conceptual equivalence, as in the case ofupset/rasstroennaia, facilitates internalization ofnew vocabulary (positive transfer). Partial equiva-lence, as in the case of angry/serdit’sia, facilitatesinternalization but may lead learners to use thewords in ways different from native speakers ofthe target language (negative transfer). Finally,the lack of a conceptual equivalent may compli-cate the internalization of particular target lan-guage items, as was the case with perezhivat’ (avoid-ance), or lead to lexical borrowing from the L1,as was the case with frustration.

Our findings also have implications for FL in-struction. Although the learners in our study didbegin to approximate native–speaker use of Rus-sian, they could nevertheless have benefited fromexplicit metalinguistic instruction about differ-ences between the Russian and English emotionlexicons. It is noteworthy that the learners re-ported during debriefing that their classes andteaching materials did not address cross-linguisticdifferences in structural patterns of emotion de-scription in the two languages. Their observa-tions were borne out in our analysis of the mostcommonly used Russian textbooks; we found thatthese texts did not explicitly discuss language-

specific semantic, pragmatic, and sociolinguisticproperties of Russian emotion vocabulary andthat some did not address emotion talk at all(Pavlenko & Driagina, 2006). Even when particu-lar texts did incorporate emotion vocabulary, thecorresponding communicative exercises focusedon descriptions of emotion states and moods, of-ten through impersonal constructions, and didnot offer much explanation or practice in descrip-tion of emotions as processes or of changes inemotion states. The results of this study show thatsuch a limited focus may result in overgeneral-ization and overuse of impersonal adverbial con-structions, underrepresentation of emotion verbs,difficulties in description of changes of emotionstates, and negative semantic and morphosyntac-tic transfer.

We suggest that emotion vocabulary needs tobe incorporated in FL instruction as a separateand important lexical and syntactic domain. InRussian language pedagogy, such incorporationmeans explicit metalinguistic instruction on struc-tural and semantic differences between Russianand English emotion lexicons, and introductionof both impersonal and agentive constructions aslegitimate ways of talking about emotions. In gen-eral, FL instruction needs to strike a balance be-tween the following three components: (a) met-alinguistic awareness-raising, that is, discussionsand exercises to help learners identify the meansused by target language speakers and writers toexpress and describe emotions; (b) emotion ex-pression, that is, written and oral exercises thatoffer learners opportunities to practice both theexpression of their own emotions and the descrip-tion of the emotions of others; and (c) emotioninterpretation, that is, written and oral exercisesthat involve identification and interpretation ofcharacters’ emotions and of affective meaningsintended by target language writers and speakers.

Learner corpora offer interesting possibilitiesin this area as a tool suited not only for learnerlanguage analysis but also for data-driven teach-ing and learning. We present a detailed discussionof how to use learner corpora for form-focusedand awareness-raising instruction in our corpus-based workbook for teachers and learners of ad-vanced Russian (Pavlenko & Driagina, 2006). Thelearners are invited to work with a retrievable cor-pus (http://www.calper.la.psu.edu) that includesbut is not limited to the corpora discussed in thepresent study. The corpus allows learners to re-trieve contextualized examples of emotion lem-mas in the speech of L1 and L2 speakers and,thus, notice gaps between their own and na-tive language forms. This approach is particularly


useful for metalinguistic awareness-raising, wherewe draw learners’ attention to overuse or under-use of problematic words (e.g., perezhivat’) andpatterns (e.g., adverbial or adjectival vs. verbalconstructions) and help them discover appropri-ate contexts for these lexical and syntactic choices.Corpus-driven exercises are also a useful resourcefor teaching emotion expression and emotion in-terpretation. In our own workbook, students arefirst asked to locate emotion references in thenarratives available from the retrievable corpus;they are also encouraged to work with emotionvocabulary in a larger corpus of Russian-languagematerials (http://www.RusCorpora.ru). This in-terpretive work allows them to locate appropriatemodels for encoding their own affective mean-ings.

In the contexts where appropriate corporaare not available, teachers may consider collect-ing their own, as well as using literary texts,films, songs, poetry, and other written or spo-ken texts for similar exercises focused on form,interpretation, and self-expression. We also ad-vocate exercises that promote learner analysisof their own emotion talk. This learner-drivenapproach offers students more active and re-sponsible roles than traditional present–practice–produce paradigms (Granger, 2002; Seidlhofer,2002), which is of particular importance for such apersonal and subjective topic as the expression offeelings.

We hope that our work will inspire further in-vestigations of how emotions are encoded andexpressed in languages other than Russian andin the speech of L2 learners of these languages(see also Dewaele, 2005). We also hope that it willenable Russian-language teachers to incorporateemotion vocabulary into their classrooms and toexamine the effectiveness of such pedagogical in-terventions.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The research reported here was partially fundedby a grant from the U.S. Department of Education(CFDA 84.229, P229A020010-03) to the Center of Ad-vanced Language Proficiency Education and Research(CALPER). However, the contents of the paper donot necessarily represent the policy of the Departmentof Education, and one should not assume endorse-ment by the federal government. The paper has sig-nificantly benefited from insightful comments made byBenjamin Rifkin, Slava Paperno, and the anonymousreviewers. For his generous help with statistical anal-ysis, we are extremely grateful to Jean-Marc Dewaele.

All remaining errors and inaccuracies are strictly ourown.

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APPENDIX AEnglish Emotion Lemmas in the Narratives by American Monolinguals (N = 50)

Nouns (n = 16) Adjectives (n = 209) Verbs (n = 49) Adverbs (n = 3)

anger 2 angry 24 bother 1 angrily 2depression 2 confused 1 break down 1 emotionally 1disbelief 4 depressed (-ing) 5 comfort 4disgust 1 disappointed 2 console 5distress 1 disheartened 1 cry 15emotion 1 distraught 4 deal 7feeling (-s) 2 distressed (-ing) 3 disbelieve 1tears 1 disturbed (-ing) 5 disturb 1unresolve 1 embarrassed 1 feel 1worriment 1 frustrated (-ing) 6 resent 2

furious 1 sigh 1mad 16 sob 1perplexed 1 upset (someone) 8pissed (off) 2 worry 1puzzled 2sad 10shocked 2traumatic 1unhappy 1upset 119upsetting 2

APPENDIX BRussian Emotion Lemmas in the Narratives by Russian Monolinguals (N = 49)


gore 3 vzvolnovana 3 bespokoit�s� 1 muqitel�no 1‘grief, sorrow’ ‘agitated, anxious, worried’ ‘to worry’ ‘agonizingly’dosada 2 vozmuwena (-na�) 2 vzdyhat� 3 nevero�tno 1‘annoyance’ ‘indignant’ ‘to sigh’ ‘incredibly’zlost� 1 vstrevo�enny� 1 volnovat�s� 1 nepri�tno 1‘anger, malice, spite’ ‘anxious’ worried ‘to worry, to be anxious,

agitated’‘unpleasantly’

isterika 1 gorestnye 1 gorevat� 1 nervno 1‘hysterics’ ‘sad, sorrowful’ ‘to grieve’ ‘nervously’nastroenie 3 nedovol�na 3 (za-) plakat� 10 ploho 1‘mood’ ‘unhappy, discontent’ ‘to cry, to begin crying’ ‘badly’nervy 2 nervna� 1 zlit� 1 razgnevanno 1‘nerves’ ‘nervous’ ‘to anger’ ‘angrily, in wrath’neudovol�stvie 1 ogorqena ‘-na�’ 4 nervniqat� 4 t��elo 1‘discontent’ ‘pained, annoyed’ ‘to worry, to be anxious,

nervous’‘heavily, withdifficulty’

ogorqenie 1 ozaboqena 1 obi�at�s� 1‘pain, suffering, ‘concerned, ‘to take offense, to feelvexation’ worried’ hurt’otqa�nie 1 opeqalena 1 obradovat� 1‘despair’ ‘saddened’ ‘to make someone happy’panika 1 peqal�na� 3 ogorqat�’-s�’ 8‘panic’ ‘sad’ ‘to be pained, annoyed’pere�ivani� 2 podavlena 1 pere�ivat� 18‘worries, emotional ‘depressed’ ‘to suffer, to worry,experiences’ to experience something

keenly’

Continued


APPENDIX BContinued


peqal� 1 potr�senna� 2 porazit� 1‘sorrow, grief, sadness’ ‘shocked’ ‘to shock, to strike’razoqarovanie 1 (ne) radostna� 3 potr�sti 2‘disappointment’ ‘unhappy, literally: not joyful’ ‘to shock’rasstro�stvo 3 razdra�ena 1 psihovat� 3‘the state of being upset’ ‘irritated’ ‘to behave in a

crazy manner’reakci� 4 rasstroena (-na�) 24 razveselit� 1‘reaction’ ‘upset’ ‘to amuse’slezy 1 (ne) sqastliva 1 razozlit�s� 1‘tears’ ‘unhappy’ ‘to become angry’smeh 1 razoqarovyvat�s� 1‘laughter’ ‘to become disappointed’smuwenie 1 rasstroit�’-s�’ 43‘embarrassment, ‘to upset, to get upset’confusion’sm�tenie 1 reagirovat� 1‘distress, disarray’ ‘to react’sopere�ivanie 1 soquvstvovat� 1‘empathy, compassion’ ‘to empathize’sosto�nie 4 tronut� 1‘state’ ‘to touch’quvstva 5 ubivat�s� 1‘feelings’ ‘to grieve, to mourn’�mocii 6 udivl�t� 2‘emotions’ ‘-s�’ ‘to be surprised’

uspokoit� 1‘to calm someone down’quvstvovat� 2‘to feel’

APPENDIX CRussian Emotion Lemmas in the Narratives by Advanced American Learners of Russian (N = 30)


Bespoko�stvo 1 grustna� 14 bespokoit�s� 2 grustno 9‘the state of worrying’ ‘sad’ ‘to worry’ ‘sadly’duxa 1 nevesela� 3 bo�t�s� 1 nepri�tno 1‘soul’ ‘unhappy, sad’ ‘to fear, to be afraid’ ‘unpleasantly’koxmar 1 peqal�noe 1 vozbu�dat� 1 nedovol�no 1‘nightmare, horror’ ‘sad’ ‘to excite’ ‘unhappily’nastroenie 1 radostna� ‘rada’ 2 vozmuwat�s� 2 obidno 3‘mood’ ‘happy, glad’ ‘to be indignant’ ‘hurtfully’neudovol�stvie 1 razdra�ena 1 (za)plakat� 23 ploho 4‘discontent’ ‘irritated’ ‘to cry, to begin crying’ ‘badly’otqa�nie 2 razoqarovana 2 obi�at�s� 5 serdito 2‘despair’ ‘disappointed’ ‘to take offense, to feel hurt

[by someone]’‘angrily’

razdra�enie 2 rasstroena 10 ogorqat� (-s�) 2 smexno 1‘irritation’ ‘upset’ ‘to be pained, annoyed’ ‘funny, funnily’

Continued


APPENDIX CContinued


serdce 1 serdita� 7 razdra�at� 3 straxno 1‘heart’ ‘angry, cross’ ‘to irritate’ ‘scary, scarily’sosto�nie 2 sqastliva 1 (ras-) serdit�s� 17 sqastlivo 1‘state’ ‘happy’ ‘to get cross, angry [at someone]’ ‘happy, happily’strah 1 rasstraivat�s� 9‘fear’ ‘to get upset’u�as 1 soquvstvovat� 3‘horror’ ‘to empathize’frustraci� 1 udivl�t� 1‘frustration’ ‘to surprise’quvstva 2 uspokoit�’-s�’ 2‘feelings’ ‘to calm down’�mocii 1 utexat� 4‘emotions’ ‘to pacify’

frastrirovat� 2‘to frustrate’

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Russian Emotion Vocabulary in American Learners - The Astro