“Du dauerst mich!” The Expression of Emotions in Grimm’s Fairy Tales

Abstract

This paper deals, from a linguistic point of view, with the emotions or feelings which can be found in the Children’s and Household Tales of the Brothers Grimm. Theoretical background is provided, on the one hand, by Wierzbicka’s semantic descriptions of emotional scenarios by means of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM). On the other hand, there is the understanding of emotions as predications proposed by Fries, who has developed a method for analyzing and encoding the so-called emotional scenes in literary texts. I then present an (not complete) inventary of emotions contained in Grimm’s Fary Tails parting from their propositional expression, that is, nouns, adjectives and verbs naming the emotions, but I also include their non-propositional expression. Finally, I analyze and comment some examples of emotional scenes, which can be recognized and identified without great afford on the narratologic level. As a result, one can say that all these emotional scenes together make a sort of “emotional school” both in a linguistic and a cognitive way.