View/Open - University of Zululand Institutional Repository

Chapter 7
CONCLUSIONS
This has been a study of the expression of emotion by language. It entailed
looking at how language encodes emotion and the role of emotion during conflict
transformation. One point that came out clearly was that there is no unanimity among
the different scholars about what emotions are and which emotions could be called
basic emotions, as evidenced by the fact that the writers give a range of from four to
eight basic emotions. In some instances what is regarded as a basic emotion in one
culture is not regarded in the same way in another culture.
There is agreement that some emotions are innate and, therefore, basic e.g. fear,
anger, happiness,etc. When two or more emotions blend together they form secondary
or derived emotions, for example anxiety, a blend offear and guilt or shame.
In chapter 3 I showed through examples from IsiZulu, English and Afrikaans
that language encodes emotion through all structural
levels e.g. word order, verbs,
suprasegmental features,etc. I also noted that emotions arise out of social contexts,
therefore it is important to understand the social context in which emotions are
experienced and expressed.
The study is primarily about emotion in conflict transformation, a facilitated
form ofnegotiation. Negotiation is a persuasive process during which a range of special
strategies are encoded by means of linguistic structures to enable conflicted minds to
reconceptualise the conflict secenarios that they are trapped in as cooperative scenarios.
In particular, speech acts, metaphors and modal auxiliary verbs
are used during
persuasion. Persuasion is about getting your opponent to change an attitude to one
346