Abstract
Emotion in Multilingual Interaction is a dense, 12-chapter volume which describes how emotion is reported and evoked in multilingual interaction across various countries and contexts. One of the objectives of this work is to inspire research which examines emotion in interaction across a range of social settings and activities, and as this book provides a panoply of methods and tools, this objective is fulfilled. Emotionality is examined under various lenses and contexts. The countries and emotional interactions examined are vast (disaster stories in Japanese conversation, co-participation of emotion in French between an au pair and her Swiss host mother, L2 Swedish acquisition of emotional stance by a Somali child, and affective formulations in Italy between Chinese and Arabic interpreters and Italian doctors – just to name a few). From this abridged list, one sees that there is no lack of imagination with respect to how emotionality can be researched. Many of the chapters in the book use standard conversation analytic (CA) conventions which is one, if not the only, binding tenet for continuity throughout the volume. Other strong methodological tenets include those espoused by language socialization which includes focus on affect and stance.
While this volume is too vast to examine chapter by chapter, Chapter 1, by Matthew Prior, one of the editors, is noteworthy because it appropriately sets the stage and provides a rich literature review of the interdisciplinary fields which influence the volume and the work on emotion in general. This chapter is thus relevant to those enchanted and drawn to this field as a whole. Prior is efficient in conveying the relevance of the volume, stating that while the relationship between emotion and multilingual research has been acknowledged, analytical attention to the production and management of emotion in situ has been absent. The use of video frames in Chapter 2 allows us to see smiling and gaze production in the climax of storytelling, while wave forms in conjunction with CA poignantly display when Japanese L2 learners of English revert to their L1 in awe talk in Chapter 5. The use of wave forms in the methodology thus depicts the difference in Oh versus Ogh in a way that a CA transcript could not, thus empirically making the case that awe-moments may evoke such emotion that agents refer to their L1 even in an L2 context. The analytical attention to the production of emotion investigated in this volume using various means is its main contribution.
As the focus is on emotion, this reader expected more ethnographic description about the context and the subjects – as if emotion were indicative of qualitative or socially grounded research. Perhaps this is a false assumption to hold. There is some detail, but in most cases, it offers a glimpse, rather than a vivid description. Additionally, I was struck by Chapter 6 on emotional stance. This chapter is a language socialization study documenting the lexico-grammatical features and embodied emotional stances of a 7-year-old Somali child who is a L2 learner in a Swedish primary school in a low-socio-economic suburb. Through various sketches to depict the classroom and child, the researcher describes how the child employed non-compliant emotional stance vis-à-vis her teacher. The research is longitudinal and multimodal. We see how the child’s interactional skills diversified over the course of the year to better express her non-compliance using embodied and prosodic resources. While understanding of negotiation of emotionality in L2 encounters is relevant, the lacuna was a solution of sorts. In our globalized migratory world and especially when investigating negotiation of emotional stance in education, it seems dutiful to put forth some sort of solution or coda, which in this case was absent. But then, this could have been an unrealistic expectation to have on this reader’s behalf.
On the other hand, Chapter 9 is to emotionality and interaction what Labov and Waletzky (1967) are to narrative research and what Schieffelin and Ochs (1986) are to language socialization. This chapter draws on Prior’s (2016) previous work on emotion and discourse in narrative research (reviewed in Discourse Studies, 2017, 19(2): 234–235). The chapter provides a noteworthy 10-item schema of features of intentionality and emotionality which is germane to qualitative researchers in many disciplines.
Chapter 12 is pertinent and pragmatic to second language acquisition studies as it examines how emotions are conveyed via emoticons between L1 and L2 learners of Spanish. In this chapter, Gonzàlez-Lloret shows how emotion, and even certain cultural practices, is conveyed using semiotic resources afforded by computer-mediated communication.
The scope and the designated audience for this volume are vast, the scope being the treatment of the social constitution of emotion, how it is publicly displayed and ‘visibly and consequentially produced by participants for each other on specific occasions in and across their activities’ (p. 1). Prior designates the readers as those ‘scholars interested in emotion, social interaction and the multisemiotic resources and communicative potential of human activity’ (p. 16). With such aspirations, one can see how elements of this volume are of interest to those conducting research on emotionality. On the other hand, the fact that the scope is so vast is also a drawback, as the writing styles and multiple contexts sometimes read disjointedly, as if the chapter authors were not necessarily in conversation with each other; this is also understandable given the multitude of contexts treated. In this manner, the book reads as a handbook of emotion in multilingual interaction.