That Reminds Me of a Story

While there has been a great deal of interest in the variability of discrete aspects of the learner’s interlanguage, such as specific syntactic or phonological patterns or of errors, this chapter focuses on variation which is motivated by pragmatics. One aspect of language use, namely, the way in which language is used to express emotion, is particularly interesting for the study of variation, but it has received little attention from linguists. As I try to show in what follows, the language of emotion varies on dimensions associated with pragmatic variation, such as directness, and it varies with respect to contextual variables pertaining to setting and speaker. There is also variation in the way emotional expression is embedded in discourse. In this chapter, I try to explore some of the variety of ways in which emotion is expressed through language, and I describe some research into how second-language acquirers interpret emotion in language they hear as well as attempt to produce language with emotional content.