Representation of emotion in English syntax and teaching Russian EFL students

Abstract

The article looks into English simple utterances about a person’s emotional state. The authors dwell on the ways the English simple sentence patterns are employed in utterances about emotional states and reveal the types of sentence patterns and types of propositions (event schemas) structuring emotional states. The authors also discuss the factors that determine the way a particular emotional event is conceptualized and structured and describe the mechanisms underlying the representation of emotional states in syntax and the choice of a sentence pattern for an utterance about this event. Special attention is given to the mechanism of conceptual metaphor that manifests itself in sentence patterns. The paper lists types of propositional schemas mapped onto concepts of emotional experiences and singles out regular correspondences between the source domain and the target-domain in these metaphorical mappings. The authors also tackle the issue of applying knowledge of sentence representation of emotional states in teaching Russian EFL students to use English syntax correctly and authentically. Teaching syntax in the proposed approach is aimed at helping students to assimilate propositional schemas of the English sentence as models of structuring reality with their metaphoric extensions and then to develop skills of employing these schemas in speaking.

Keywords

• emotional states
• sentence pattern
• proposition
• conceptual metaphor
• efl teaching