Olivia Judson, who writes about science for the New York Times, mentions in her column today the possibility that some facial expressions can cause certain emotions (in addition to being expressions of those emotions):
A set of experiments investigating the effects of facial movements on mood used different vowel sounds as a stealthy way to get people to pull different faces. (The idea was to avoid people realizing they were being made to scowl or smile.) The results showed that if you read aloud a passage full of vowels that make you scowl — the German vowel sound ü, for example — you’re likely to find yourself in a worse mood than if you read a story similar in content but without any instances of ü. Similarly, saying ü over and over again generates more feelings of ill will than repeating a or o.
She goes on to write:
Of course, facial gestures aren’t the whole story of emotions; moreover, languages can potentially influence emotions in many other ways. Different languages have different music — sounds and rhythms — that could also have an emotional impact. The meanings of words may influence moods more than the gestures used to make them. And just as the words a language uses to describe colors affects how speakers of that language perceive those colors, different languages might allow speakers to process particular emotions differently; this, in turn, could feed into a culture, perhaps contributing to a general tendency towards gloom or laughter.
(Sources of the studies she reports can be found below her blog post, at http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/a-language-of-smiles/
Years ago when I was thinking of the person on whom I modeled the subject of my poem “Desterrado, late 1960s” (in Sparrow: New and Selected Poems), I wrote this phrase: “the language-shaped curve of his mouth.” I was thinking about how something seems different in the configuration of the face in persons who speak Spanish vs. French vs. German. And I was wondering if this had to do with lifelong use of the facial muscles to produce certain phonemes (especially vowels) and not others.
The empirical data that Judson points to may be the beginning of another rethinking of the idea, so popular in literary studies for decades, that language is a perfectly arbitrary system of signs that contain no inherent meaning in themselves. The linguist Roman Jakobson wrote in one of his essays that in the early 20th century there were empirical studies that established that certain consonantal phonemes were associated with two opposed ideas–specifically, the idea of what is hard, sharp, pointed, etc., vs. the idea of what is rounded, soft. Every speaker of English probably has a sense of which consonants those are, and the experiments that Jakobson cited were conducted in several different European languages, so there was little question of the ideas being associated with existing words.
And in fact other recent studies have shown that a word that is gendered in opposite ways in two languages (say, German and French) produces opposite associations that are indeed related to whether it is grammatically gendered masculine or feminine. Of course this would not be true of all nouns, but it does contradict persuasively what our language teachers told us when we learned that the language we were studying gendered nouns–which was that the grammatical gender had nothing to do with the thing itself. Fair enough; but it can have something to do with the associations and connotations.
This is one of the ways the mind receives, decodes, and plays with language. If it weren’t true that language were so complex, then it would not have occurred to Victorian people of very proper upbringing and manners to put skirts around the bottom of a grand piano so that no one would see the legs, because to see the legs would then connote seeing human legs, and those would turn into female legs, very lovely ones, and the audience would be morally corrupted by the design of the piano. (!) The thing (that which is signified) can change the signifier just as much as the signifier controls our idea of the thing.
Poetry brings such associations and connotations into play, at least in “the back of the mind.” (And in the front of the mind, too, in those who, like musicians, have not only trained the back but are also restlessly, inventively thinking with the front.) I have long been annoyed by the argumentative tendency to want such matters to be decisively one way or another–words are perfectly arbitrary signs (dog, perro, cane, chien)?; words are all mystically related to what they mean?. Nope. Neither. (Some) words have some relation to what they signify (mama, maman, mami, mom, mater, mae, mutter, moder; or point, punto, punkt, ikkaku, pontertek; or words for spike… and others). That’s one of the things we work with when we write and keep our ears open for the sounds our words make.
