Unpacking the Conceptualizations of Hayâ

Emotion is an important domain of human experience and is largely subject to categorization. Barrett (2006: 20) states that “[t]he experience of emotion is an act of categorization, guided by embodied knowledge about emotion”. Categorization is a basic cognitive activity (Polzenhagen and Xia 2015) which starts in the early stages of life by setting up specific categories and is shaped gradually by the cultural environment and language. Cultural categorization (besides individual and institutional categorization) focuses on the categories that are shared by a cultural group and are associated with language (Glushko et al. 2008). In the framework of Cultural Linguistics (Sharifian 2011), cultural categories are considered as a sub-class of cultural conceptualizations, providing us with insightful data on the link between language and culture. Different languages give their speakers the tools to label their cultural categories which are often through lexical items and grammatical markers (Hercus 1994). To delve into the cultural categorization of shame (Hayâ) in Persian, we need to identify the emotion words associated with it. To this end, a corpus analysis was conducted, and Hayâ was identified as a sham-related lexeme in Persian. Before discussing Hayâ as a cultural category, it is noteworthy to rely on an argument proposed by Wierzbicka (1994) which describes an emotion word as an artefact of culture that cannot have exact equivalents in every language. Therefore, in this study, attempts were made to highlight the closest key words in English in translating Persian concepts: words that can best capture nuances of meanings and their conceptualizations.