Emotion Review

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Love, Loss, and Hope Go Deeper than Language: Linguistic Semantics Has Only a Limited Role in the
Interdisciplinary Study of Affect
Leonard D. Katz
Emotion Review 2009 1: 19
DOI: 10.1177/1754073908097178
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Love, Loss, and Hope Go Deeper than Language:

Linguistic Semantics Has Only a Limited Role in the
Interdisciplinary Study of Affect

Emotion Review
Vol. 1, No. 1 (Jan. 2009) 1920
2009 SAGE Publications
and The International Society
for Research on Emotion
ISSN 1754-0739
DOI: 10.1177/1754073908097178
http://emr.sagepub.com

Leonard D. Katz
Linguistics and Philosophy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

Abstract
Human emotional experience is organized at multiple levels, only some of
which are easily penetrable by or dependent on language. Affects connected
with mammalian parental care seem involved in Anna Wierzbickas example
of the experience of Jesus in Gethsemane. However, such affects are not
characterizable as she requires, using only NSMs short list of linguistic
semantic universals. Following her methodology, even using an enriched
NSM really exhaustive of linguistic semantic universals, may involve serious
losses of cognitive opportunity. Specifically, it forecloses any possibility of
linking language with other cognitive resources to construct novel concepts,
as may be needed to understand the deep biologically-based structure of
emotionwhich, after all, goes far deeper in us than language does.

Keywords
concept formation, language in emotion research, loss, NSM methodology,
separation distress

Human emotional experience is organized at multiple levels,

only some of which are easily penetrable by or dependent on
language. For example, the affects concerned with mammalian
parental care seem as hard-wired in us as the upturned and
downturned mouth expressions Wierzbicka acknowledges to be
so, but are less easily captured in her restricted semantics. They
are not concerned with her generic good or bad, but, at their
origin, with soliciting and providing parental care and preventing and reacting to its loss.
At least in apes and old world monkeys, representations by the
caregiver and young of each other and of the others emotional
reactions and feelings form the basis of a first and prototypical
social bond, disruption of which may have large consequences for
later affect and social relations. Widespread past knowledge of
relevant research in English-speaking countries, not only among
scientists but also among clinicians and the general public, presumably lies behind the currency of the theme of loss that
Wierzbicka, in her ethnographic voice, notes. John Bowlbys
Attachment and Loss trilogy (Bowlby, 1969, 1973, 1980) presumably
had antecedents in his miserably lonely experience as a sevenyear-old upper class English boarding school boy, separated from
his surviving parent. But this made his research on children and
his Attachment Theory no less applicable to understanding the

plight of neglected children in orphanages in other lands, or by

ethologists with whom he worked, to isolated young rhesus monkeys (van der Horst, van der Veer, & van Ijzendoorn, 2007).
Affective neuroscience and evolutionary psychology (Panksepp,
1998, pp. 261279; Panksepp, Nelson, & Bekkedal, 1997) study
the sources of such experience of loss. (This words oldest senses, of perishing and destruction, as in lost at sea, fit well the
evolutionary danger that shaped the panic reaction of separated
mammalian young; the derived meaning of loss of possessions
is paralleled in the similar semantic evolution of Romance
perd- and Semitic /abad.)
The experience of Jesus in Gethsemane, before his arrest,
discussed by Wierzbicka on the basis of Gospel accounts, principally Mark 14:3341, may be understood, in part, as involving affect of such a kind, for which the separation distress of
abandoned mammalian young is the prototype. There Jesus
addresses God, as did others of his faith and time, as father;
later, in his last words on the cross (Mark 15:34), he cries out
asking God why he has forsaken him. He does so using the
words of Psalm 22:1, which later refers explicitly to the body
parts involved in mammalian prenatal and postnatal nurturance
(vv. 910) in describing the dependent beseechers feeling that
his trust, placed in God from his earliest days, has now been
betrayed as he is abandoned to his enemies. This is not, however, spoken out of depressive despair, the final stage of separation distress, but rather in energetic impassioned protest,
hopefully praying for ultimate salvation and promising praise
for that when it will have come. This stage is consistent with the
sympathetic nervous system arousal indicated by Lukes
account of Jesus profuse sweating in Gethsemane (Luke 22:44),
to which Wierzbicka calls attention. Seen thus, Jesus psychological torment, in Gethsemane and on the cross, is so far of a
biological and theological piece. He suffers like, in a way, an
abandoned or abused young child, even while having faith in
ultimate salvation and reconciliation. Wierzbickas method
misses this by privileging linguistic universals in the search for
emotion universals, where we should take language as only one
source of information among many. The liability to mammalian
separation distress may be humanly universal although its typical scenario cannot be characterized in her list of linguistic
semantic universals.

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Corresponding author: Leonard D. Katz, Massachusetts Institute
of Technology,
Cambridge,
MAMissoni
02139,
lkatz@mit.edu

20

Emotion Review Vol. 1 No. 1

Language enables novel joint deployments of other cognitive resources only by connecting with these. While some core
of human language is presumably humanly biologically universal, its development of interfaces with some other faculties is
not. The Pirah, to give a salient example, may have no words
for the natural numbers, nor can these be logically constructed
from the concepts of a little, some, and many, which the Pirah
have. This would be of great interest for linguistics and cognitive science, but it would not make Pirah a useful language for
arithmetic nor would it make it ethnocentric to think that a
Pirah wishing to prosper in trade should be advised to learn
words by which to count. (See Carey, in press, for discussion of
the Pirah and also for a different approach to finding the universal elements of thought.)
Studying human emotion using only a universal common core
of linguistic semantic primitives involves ignoring anything some
language can express but others cannot. But even if, as one may
infer from absences on the current NSM list, some languages lack
lexical resources for distinguishing age, sex, or the kinship of
mother and child, that would not show their users to be otherwise
less aware of these things than chimpanzees seem to be. And even
if they are so benighted, such distinctions and relations might be
needed to understand the structure of the social affects all humans
share with other mammals. If using richer languages carries an
increased risk of error, hazarding this still seems a better bet than
taking a vow of intellectual poverty, relying on NSMs promise
that all possible human concepts can be constructed from its
slender panlinguistic basisespecially when even the concepts
of child, woman, and the motheroffspring relation cannot be

constructed on the version that is on offer now. But even if NSM

were enriched and adequate to express all linguistic semantic universals, we might still, by adopting Wierzbickas methodology
for the study of emotion, lose real opportunities the approach
rules out (that Wierzbicka holds to be impossible): of linking language with other cognitive resources to construct novel languagemediated concepts (as those of us who are not Pirah may have
done in acquiring number concepts) that may be needed to understand the deep biologically-based structure of emotionwhich
after all goes deeper in us, in our experiencing, and in our knowing than language does.

References
Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment: Attachment and loss: Vol. 1. New York:
Basic Books.
Bowlby, J. (1973). Separation: Anxiety and anger. Attachment and loss:
Vol. 2. New York: Basic Books.
Bowlby, J. (1980). Loss: Sadness and depression. Attachment and loss:
Vol. 3. New York: Basic Books.
Carey, S. (in press). The origin of concepts. New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Panksepp, J. (1998). Affective neuroscience: The foundations of human and
animal emotions. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Panksepp, J., Nelson, E., & Bekkedal, M. (1997). Brain systems for the
mediation of social separation-distress and social reward: Evolutionary
antecedents and neuropeptide intermediaries. Annals of the New York
Academy of Sciences, 80, 78100.
Van der Horst, F. C. P., Van der Veer, R., & Van Ijzendoorn, M. H. (2007).
John Bowlby and ethology: An annotated interview with Robert Hinde
[Special Issue: The Life and Work of John Bowlby]. Attachment and
Human Development, 19, 4 , 321335.

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