Text Comprehension As A Process Of Emotional Feeling
WHO EVEN CARES?! OH YES, MORE PLEASE! THE MORE, THE BETTER))).
Among the ways to graphically represent the means of emotional expression is the repetition of sounds (yesss, sooo scary – represents a sarcastic reaction). Orthographic incorrectness is often used to stress the emotional state of the user (Whut da hell is going on? – as an expression of indignation). Mathematical symbols and their repetition also graphically reflect emotions (++++ – expresses approval and agreement with the author).
One of the most popular means of emotional expression is emoticons, or smileys. These are pictographic symbols and punctuation mark combinations. More up-to-date software has ‘built-in pictures’. The means is considered to be the closest to human emotions expression since emoticons are able to depict a rather wide range of both positive and negative emotions. Emoticons are only specific of the computer- mediated communication, being very rarely used in other types of the written speech.
Among lexical means of emotiveness there are emotional vocabulary, figures of speech, occasional words (mostly of compressive nature) the examples of which are given below. (Recipients are enumerated since they are anonymous).
“Zagitova hits Medvedeva’s world record in short program, Pyongyang Olympics”. R. 1. Has she already had doping tests?
R. 2. These Olympics don’t bring any joy at all. R. 3. Bravo Russia!!!
R. 4. My, oh, my! Our cuties!!)
R. 5. I wonder how soon they will find Meldonium.
R. 6. No flag. Definitely from Russia
R. 7. So graceful and elegant and magic and entrancing you forget how to breathe! R. 8. Our pretty girls will eat them all for breakfast!! ))
R. 9. These two little swan birdies are our only hope... R. 10. They are not from Russia, they are from nowhere!
As it is seen from the recipients’ reactions to the tweet, all emotional responses can conditionally be divided into two types: “co-rejoicing” and disapproval and malevolence. While some participants of the
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Internet-communication express support and cheer the sportsmen up, others reveal their condemnation personally towards Russia’s representatives or the overall current situation.
Yet another microblog text, this time devoted to a tragic event. And again, we can observe two types of emotional reactions: compassion/condolence and disapproval. The latter does not refer to the victims but there are malevolence reactions concerning the situation on the whole. The following responses to the sentence given below prove this statement.
“AN148 “Saratov Airlines” jet crashed outside Moscow”. R. 1. Bloody hell! They let a junk heap take off again? R. 2. Lord, grant Thy peace upon their souls …
R. 3. Poor things, there also were kids on board
R. 4. Everything is messed up and ruined including civil aviation! R. 5. What a terrible news (((
R. 6. Fly Aeroflot, what can I say. R. 7. No words… that’s awful! R. 8. The less Russians, the better…
It should also be noted that some means of the negative evaluation expression are only typical of the internet-communication since the basic features of such type of communication are its computer- mediated character and anonymity. It can be also explained by the fact that the anonymous character of the internet-communication obviously has some “psychological consequences” [Kiesler, Siegel, McGuire 1984]. We can observe these consequences represented in the comments made by some Internet- communication participants in form of negative feelings close to deviations in normal social behavior. Conclusion
Thus, summing up the analysis of the experimental data discussed above we come to the following conclusion. Text comprehension is not only data perception and data learning but, first of all, data experiencing. In other words, comprehension of information in the form of different text-types can be considered as a process of emotional feeling of the information perceived by a recipient.
As we could observe, any kind of information even the so-called ‘neutral facts’ can provoke different forms of emotions, such as joy, surprise, empathy, disapproval, hostility, wrath, malevolence. Though the type of the text and the peculiarities of the discourse contribute much to the strategies used by recipients in the process of comprehension which is obviously demonstrated by our experimental data. While the Bible texts “tune” recipients to ‘co-feeling’, ‘co-rejoicing’ and empathy, glossy magazines texts reveal the tendency to evoking in our experiment participants such feeling as irony and critical attitude. At last, the Internet comments made by microblog users and analyzed by us with the principles of the “internal counter-text” method demonstrate not only positive empathy but to a great extent aggressive feelings. In our opinion this could be explained by specific virtual internet-communication erasing limitations which exist in actual social interaction. We share the opinion that it could be the reason for neglecting generally accepted social rules and ignoring verbal behavior norms [Lapidot-Lefler, Barak 2012: 440].
Besides, we can state again that the “internal counter-text” method has proved to be a good instrument for revealing the peculiarities of recipients’ verbal consciousness in text comprehension processes.
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