Language, Feeling, and the Transformations of Expression: From Embodied Affect to Linguistically Mediated Emotion

AbstractThe relation between language and emotion is often framed as a choice between two positions: either feelings exist in a complete form before words and language merely reports them, or language constructs emotion so thoroughly that meaningful affective life cannot be separated from linguistic categories. This article argues that both formulations collapse distinct levels of analysis. Drawing on affective neuroscience, appraisal and constructionist theories, interoceptive and predictive accounts, psycholinguistics, cross-cultural semantics, bilingualism, phenomenology, and philosophy of mind, it develops a layered account of affective mediation. Bodily and action-oriented affective dynamics need not depend on explicit language, while differentiated, conceptually organized and reportable emotions may be partly shaped by learned categories, including those scaffolded by language. Verbal articulation can further transform affective episodes through attention, conceptual selection, social communication, memory, and regulation. The resulting discrepancy between lived experience and expression is therefore conceptualized as selective transformation rather than corruption of an original emotional essence. The paper proposes affective mediation as a heuristic framework distinguishing bodily affect, conscious feeling, conceptual categorization, linguistic articulation, and narrative integration while treating these processes as recurrently interacting rather than linearly ordered.