Bilingualism, emotions and morality: a study based on the appraisal system

Abstract

This paper presents a research about the influence of bilingualism on the morality of Brazilian speakers of English as a foreign language, taking the emotional content of their text as basis for the analysis. We investigate if there is variation in the emotional content between texts written in native language and foreign language, and if this variation has a correlation with moral positioning, being the concepts for these positionings take from Psychology, not from the category ‘judgement’ from the appraisal system. The experiment we executed in this investigation consisted in the production of written texts that justified a moral positioning about a situation described on the research questionnaire. To each participant, two situations were presented, one in English and another in Portuguese, asking for both a positioning and its justification, to be written in the same language as the presented situation. The texts were analyzed in accordance to the Appraisal System, as elaborated by Martin and White (2005), through which the parameters of what is considered an emotional content in the texts was defined. The nature of the positioning that were taken was defined through the concept of Utilitarism, as presented in Costa et al. (2014). The results have shown that there is emotional variance in emotional content between languages, but that it isn’t necessarily linked to moral positionings.