Exploring a systemic functional semiotics approach to understanding emotional expression in singing performance: Implications for music education

Engagement with songs through performance and analysis is a key component of music curricula worldwide. Music learning has a significant impact on a number of student competencies, including enhancing students’ communicative abilities as they learn to manipulate, express, and share sound in both voice qualities and lyrics. However, common analyses of singing performance rarely focus exclusively on voice quality, and there is no systematic framework which considers how emotional meaning in lyrics interacts with emotional meaning in voice quality. Drawing on systemic functional semiotics, this article proposes a unified theoretical framework for examining how emotional meaning is co-constructed in the voice and lyrics in singing performance. This framework provides a novel approach for discussing and teaching song analysis and performance. The framework will be illustrated through the analysis of the interaction between voice quality and lyrics in the song “Someone Like You” performed by Adele.

Emotive Expression in Text and Ways of Translation

Research relevance: there are isomorphic features of the investigated interjections in semantics, pragmatic terms and in structure. Research objectives: to reveal the emotional meaning of the Russian interjection Tsyts and the way of its translation into English and Kyrgyz languages. Research materials and methods: the authors use the method of translation and comparison of interjections in The Quiet Don by M. Sholokhov, Farewell to Gyulsary by Ch. Aitmatov and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by M. Twain literary works. Research results: the isomorphic features of the studied interjections coincide in their pragmatic characteristics, structure, meaning and nominative function. Conclusions: In the languages under consideration, by their syntactic nature, they can act as independent sentences.

Happiness

Chapter 3 argues that the conception of the self (ātman) that Sanskrit logicians attribute to humans corresponds to how they give emotional meaning to place. First, it examines their argument—that emotions are particular to humans and do not occur in divine beings—in relation to arguments in Bengali Vaishnavism, where emotion is understood to be that which allows one to connect to the divine. Second, it examines a number of temple inscriptions that illustrate how emotions are used by those who participate in Bengali Vaishnavism. Then, it contrasts these inscriptions with colophons from the texts of Sanskrit logicians that exhibit a different emotion connected to logic. The chapter offers a comparative study that showcases competing notions of space in seventeenth-century Bengal.

Heart to Heart: A Relation-Alignment Approach to Emotion’s Social Effects

This article integrates arguments and evidence from my 2019 monograph Heart to Heart: How Your Emotions Affect Other People. The central claim is that emotions operate as processes of relation alignment that produce convergence, complementarity, or conflict between two or more people’s orientations to objects. In some cases, relation alignment involves strategic presentation of emotional information for the purpose of regulating other people’s behaviour. In other cases, emotions consolidate from socially distributed reciprocal adjustments of cues, signals, and emerging actions without any explicit registration or communication of emotional meaning by parties to the exchange. The relation-alignment approach provides a fresh perspective on issues relating to emotion’s interpersonal, intragroup, and organizational functions and clarifies how emotions are regulated for social purposes.

An Analysis Of Words Whose Emotional Meaning Changes In Modern English Linguistics

The article is devoted to the problems of interdependence of concepts and lexical meanings. Here are examples of changes in the meaning of emotional words and how these words come in different meanings. It is known from history that words change their emotional meaning entirely by chance, that is, they show that people are changing their views as social or political events change. Words that describe a person’s state of mind, their inner mood, no matter how strong or affective they are, gradually begin to lose their power and eventually lose any sensitivity and become obsolete. But that doesn’t mean they’re out of the emotional vocabulary. They simply point out that it has lost its effectiveness and is often an emotional phenomenon. Words that express the same strong emotion gradually weaken the zeal of that emotion.

Multimodal recognition of emotions in music and language

We investigated through electrophysiological recordings how music-induced emotions are recognized and combined with the emotional content of written sentences. Twenty-four sad, joyful, and frightening musical tracks were presented to 16 participants reading 270 short sentences conveying a sad, joyful, or frightening emotional meaning. Audiovisual stimuli could be emotionally congruent or incongruent with each other; participants were asked to pay attention and respond to filler sentences containing cities’ names, while ignoring the rest. The amplitude values of event-related potentials (ERPs) were subjected to repeated measures ANOVAs. Distinct electrophysiological markers were identified for the processing of stimuli inducing fear (N450, either linguistic or musical), for language-induced sadness (P300) and for joyful music (positive P2 and LP potentials). The music/language emotional discordance elicited a large N400 mismatch response ( p = .032). Its stronger intracranial source was the right superior temporal gyrus (STG) devoted to multisensory integration of emotions. The results suggest that music can communicate emotional meaning as distinctively as language.

The conceptualisation of primary emotions in the Serbian language (The case of verbs expressing joy, sadness, fear and anger)

The paper analyses the conceptual mechanisms underlying the development of secondary emotional meanings of ?non-emotional? verbs (in relation to their primary meaning). Being abstract, psychological entities, emotions are formalised and expressed by linguistic means using emotional lexis. Emotional verbs represent a type of this lexis: they denote emotions, emotional relationships and processes, emotional expression and an emotional situation as a whole. The research material consists of 92 verbs which are classified according to two criteria: a. the semantic role of the experiencer, i.e. whether the verbs denote experiencing or provoking an emotion (emotionally-active and emotionally-passive verbs) and b. the criterion of the primary emotion, i.e. whether the verbs belong to the emotional domain of joy, sorrow, fear or anger. The analysis showed that emotions are conceptualised by specific emotional metaphors, based on the pleasure: discomfort distinction. The primary metaphor MAN IS THE CONTAINER FOR EMOTIONS and the general metonymic rule PHYSIOLOGICAL MANIFESTATIONS OF EMOTIONS ARE THE EMOTION ITSELF, represent general mechanisms for the conceptualisation of secondary emotional meanings of verbs. It has also been shown that a certain type of a verb?s primary meaning potentially develops a certain secondary emotional meaning; in other words, each primary emotion has an intrinsic source domain which concretises its abstract meanings.

Learning new words’ emotional meanings in the contexts of faces and sentences

Language is a powerful vehicle for expressing emotions, although the process by which words acquire their emotional meaning remains poorly understood. This study investigates how words acquire emotional meanings using two types of associative contexts: faces and sentences. To this end, participants were exposed to pseudowords repeatedly paired either with faces or with sentences expressing the emotions of disgust, sadness, or neutrality. We examined participants’ acquisition of meanings by testing them in both within-modality (e.g., learning pseudowords with faces and testing them with a new set of faces with the target expressions) and cross-modality generalization tasks (e.g. learning pseudowords with faces and testing them with sentences). Results in the generalization tests showed that the participants in the Face Group acquired disgust and neutral meanings better than participants in the Sentence Group. In turn, participants in the Sentence Group acquired the meaning of sadness better than their counterparts in the Face Group, but this advantage was only manifested in the cross-modality test with faces. We conclude that both contexts are effective for acquiring the emotional meaning of words, although acquisition with faces is more versatile or generalizable.*