(Re)conceptualizing Emotions in (Early) Modern Romanian: From pride and (self-)love to arrogance, vanity, and ambition

The chapter deals with a conceptual-semantic innovation that emerges in the (Early) Modern Romanian cultural-affective model: the delineation of a cluster of self-oriented emotions, essentially rooted in pride and love. The analysis is corpus-based and is set within a theoretical and methodological framework that integrates relevant concepts and analytical tools of cultural linguistics, cognitive lexical semantics, textual semantics, cultural anthropology, psychology, and sociology of emotions, and cultural history of emotions. In the Early Modern Romanian cultural setting, a more independent construal of the self tends to become prominent, entailing more individual-subjective conceptualizations of emotions. Self-centered cultural schemas of pride and love, hubris pride and self-love, become salient. Certain derived emotion categories are dissociated as well: aroganţă ‘arrogance’, vanitate ‘vanity’, and ambiţie ‘ambition’. The corpus data point out a particular conceptual-semantic feature (culturally dependent and significant): all the recent individual, self-oriented emotions instantiate a dysphoric social-moral dimension, related to the existing collective norms of emotional appraisal.