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2012 4: 203Emotion ReviewZuzanna Bulat Silva a Key Portuguese Emotion Saudade

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Emotion ReviewVol. 4, No. 2 (April 2012) 203 211

The Author(s) 2012ISSN 1754-0739DOI: 10.1177/1754073911430727er.sagepub.com

We will read in English if we want to study, but we will read in Portuguese if we want to feel [emphasis added]. We will speak English to teach other people, but in order to express what we really mean we will speak Portuguese.1

Fernando Pessoa (cited in Teresa Rita Lopes [1993, pp. 154155])

Longing for something definitely lost is meaningless; so is vomiting after hearing morally disgusting information; so is freezing in anxiety when there is nobody to watch you or taking advantage of your actions . . . . Emotions like nostalgia indeed are, in a sense, luxuries that one indulges in for the sweetness of their bittersweetness, if one indulges in them which one does only infrequently.

Nico H. Frijda (1994a, p. 121)

In their own eyes (Botelho, 1990; Campos Matos, 1998; Osrio, 1974; Pimentel, 1904/1989) and also from the point of view of many outsiders (Cohen, 2003; ukaszyk 2005; Vernon, 1998; Wheeler, 1993) Portuguese people are seen as melancholic, passive, and daydreaming. Of course, these terms are stereo-types, and melancholy does not solely characterize Portuguese speakers. But, as the above quote from Pessoa2 shows, and linguistic data confirm (Buat Silva, 2008; Roquete & Fonseca, 1848/1974; Sampaio Sereno, 1996), expressing and talking about emotions plays a significant role in Portuguese social life. In the this article I would like to take a closer look at a very salient Portuguese emotionsaudade.

I have to stress here that my article concerns not the emotion of saudade as such, but rather the emotion term saudade, which

I believe to be a Portuguese cultural key word. I consider the investigation into the meaning of emotion terms a valuable and important part of emotion research. I agree with Russell (1995, p. 572) that once a clearer distinction between emotions and emotion concepts is drawn, we will be able to understand emo-tions better. This article responds also to the postulate of Shweder and Haidt (2004) that the major goal for cultural psy-chology should be to decompose emotions and emotion terms into constituent narrative slots. As they rightly point out:

It is to be hoped that by means of decomposition of the symbolic structure of the emotions, it will be possible to render the meaning of other peoples mental states without assimilating them in misleading ways to a priori set of lexical items available in the language of researcher (Shweder & Haidt, 2004, p. 410)

Saudade is one of the emotions that exist but go nameless in English (Russell, 1995, p. ix). Having in mind the primacy of English in psychological works (see Dixon, 2003), saudade seems even more fascinating and it is certainly worth studying in depth.

Starting with the dictionary definitions of saudade, and then working on the corpus of traditional fado songs, I will try to show the significance saudade has in the Portuguese cul-ture. Then, on the basis of these data, I will explain what saudade means providing its metalinguistic explication. Afterwards, I will briefly refer to Farrells work on saudade

Saudade: A Key Portuguese Emotion

Zuzanna Buat SilvaSchool of Language Studies, Australian National University, Australia Department of Romance Languages, University of Wrocaw, Poland

Abstract

I analyze the linguistic picture of the Portuguese emotion saudade, roughly nostalgia, in an attempt to show its cultural significance and contradict the view that nostalgia is a marginal feeling, deprived of any practical function.

Keywordsculture, emotion, fado, natural semantic metalanguage, saudade

Author note: This article is based on the data I gathered for my PhD dissertation Fado-podejscie semantyczne. Prba interpretacji sw kluczy, published in Wrocaw by Oficyna Wydawnicza ATUT (Buat Silva, 2008). It was written thanks to the fellowship granted to me by the Australian National University. I would like to thank Anna Wierzbicka for discussing the NSM definitions with me. I also would like to thank three anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments which helped me to prepare the final version of the manuscript.Corresponding author: Zuzanna Buat Silva, Department of Romance Languages, University of Wrocaw, Pl. Bp. Nankiera 4, 50-140 Wrocaw, Poland. Email: [email protected]

430727 EMR4210.1177/1754073911430727Buat SilvaEmotion Review2012

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204 Emotion Review Vol. 4 No. 2

(2006) and compare saudade with other afflictive emotion terms in Portuguese. Next, I will briefly discuss different syntactic frames of saudade and conclude by referring to its apparent marginality. But before going into details of explicat-ing the lexical and cultural meaning of saudade, let me briefly describe the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) paradigm and its key terms.

NSM MethodologyIn order to analyze saudade from a culturally neutral perspec-tive, I will rely here on the NSM approach (Goddard, 2008; Goddard & Wierzbicka, 2002; Wierzbicka, 1996). NSM is a decompositional approach to lexical meaning. It is based on a fixed set of symbols (semantic primes) and combinatorial rules (metagrammar). The meaning of a given word is explicated by ascribing to it a composed semantic representation (metalin-guistic explication). It is assumed that the entire meaning of a word can be explicated through reductive paraphrase, that is to say an equivalent expression composed of semantic primes and molecules.3

The repertoire of semantic primes, which consists of 63 lexical units4 (see Table 1), is based on conceptual univer-sals, not on universals of experience, environment, or cul-ture.

Explications using NSM are simple and intuitively clear to everyone, no matter what language they speak. Every language has its own version of NSM (see Goddard & Wierzbicka, 1994,

2002; Wierzbicka, 2009), which corresponds to the intersec-tion, the common core, of all languages. What NSM allows us to do is to describe complex concepts such as emotion terms without relying on Anglo categories such as happiness, sad-ness, intensity, emotional pain (or indeed emotion). We are free, as Wierzbicka (2009, p. 4) writes, to explore human emotions from a universal point of view, independent of any particular languages and cultures.

In the NSM framework emotion terms are defined through a prototypical cognitive scenario (Goddard, 1998, p. 95). It describes the meaning of an emotion via comparison with typical thoughts a person experiencing such an emotion may have. As Wierzbicka (1996, p. 180) puts it:

to feel a certain emotion means to feel like a person does who has certain (specifiable) thoughts characteristic of that particular situation (and to undergo some internal process because of this). Typically, though not necessarily, these thoughts involve references to doing or happening, to something good or bad, and to wanting or not wanting.

The view that emotions are interpretive schemes of a script-like kind is shared by many psychologists (see Shweder & Haidt, 2004, p. 405).

Cultural Key Words and Cultural ScriptsWierzbicka (1997, pp. 1516) defines cultural key words as words which are particularly important and revealing in a given culture, for example, the Russian words sudba, fate, dua, soul, and toska, melancholy.5 When the meanings of such words are examined, a valuable insight into the given culture can be gained.

Cultural key words are related to cultural scripts, that is to say culture-specific norms, values, and speech practices important for a given community (see Goddard, 2010). To understand speech practices and background norms from an insider perspective, it is necessary to understand the meanings of culturally salient words which reflect local values, social categories, and norms (Wierzbicka, 2010). The meanings of both cultural scripts and cul-tural key words can be explicated by means of NSM paraphrase, which allows the connections between the two to be easily seen.

As Wierzbicka (1997, p. 1) writes, there is a very close link between the life of a society and the lexicon of the language spoken by it. In every language there are some words that do not have equivalents in any other language. Every culture has lexically embodied values and attitudes that are particularly important for that culture (even if they have semantically close counterparts in other cultures). And cultural key words open the door for us so we can look at the culture from the inside.

Dictionary Definitions of SaudadeSaudade is usually translated into English as longing, yearning or missing, homesickness, and nostalgia. Some authors, to differentiate it from its English counterparts,

Table 1. NSM: A list of semantic primitives*

Substantives: I, YOU, SOMEONE, SOMETHING/THING, PEOPLE, BODY

Relational substantives: KIND, PARTDeterminers: THIS, THE SAME, OTHER/ELSEQuantifiers: ONE, TWO, MUCH/MANY, SOME, ALLEvaluators: GOOD, BADDescriptors: BIG, SMALLMental predicates: THINK, KNOW, WANT, FEEL, SEE, HEARSpeech: SAY, WORDS, TRUEActions, events, movement, contact:

DO, HAPPEN, MOVE, TOUCH

Location, existence, BE (SOMEWHERE), THERE ISpossession, specification: HAVE, BE (SOMEONE/SOMETHING)Life and death: LIVE, DIETime: WHEN/TIME, NOW, BEFORE, AFTER, A LONG TIME, A SHORT TIME, FOR SOME TIME, MOMENTSpace: WHERE/PLACE, HERE, ABOVE, BELOW, FAR, NEAR, SIDE, INSIDELogical concepts: NOT, MAYBE, CAN, BECAUSE, IFIntensifier, augmentor: VERY, MORESimilarity: LIKE

Note: *Wierzbicka (2009, p. 5).


Buat Silva Saudade: A Key Portuguese Emotion 205

add reinforcing adjectives to it, for example, great (Reverso Dictionary) or poignant (Vernon, 1998).

The etymology of the word saudade is a little obscure. It is generally viewed as deriving from the Latin solitudo, loneliness, with a possible influence of the Portuguese word sade, health, which in the past also meant salva-tion (Machado, 1977). Some authors argue, on the other hand, that it derives from the Arabic concept of saudah, which is said to have exactly the same meaning (Castro, 1980, quoted in Farrell, 2006).

The Dicionrio da Lngua Portuguesa Contempornea (Academia das Ciencis de Lisboa, 2001) in its European version gives two main meanings of the emotional sense of sau-dade (saudade may also mean regards when it is used in the plural at the end of a letter6):

1. recordao de alguma coisa que foi agradvel mas que est distante no tempo ou no espao [a memory of something that was pleasant but is distant in terms of time or space];

2. sentimento de tristeza pela morte de algum ou perda de alguma coisa a que afectivamente se estava muito ligado [a feeling of sadness because of someones death or because of losing something that one had a strong affection for] (Academia das Ciencis de Lisboa, 2001, p. 3349).

In the Grande Dicionrio da Lngua Portuguesa (Machado, 1981, Vol. 11, p. 13) it is stated that saudade is vocbulo considerado sem equivalente noutras lnguas e que exprime multiplicidade de sentimentos, sobretudo a melancolia causada pela lembrana do bem do qual se est privado, a word that probably doesnt have equivalents in other languages, and that expresses a lot of feelings, especially melancholy, caused by recalling something good that one was deprived of.7

Saudade is mostly used in the following syntactic frames (see Farrell, 2006): ter saudade, to have saudade, sentir saudade, to feel saudade, and estar com saudade, to be with saudade. It is quite often used in all the above collocations in the plural with quantifiers like muitas, many or tantas, so many. I will return to those syntactic frames later, when I explicate the meaning of the word saudade.

One can speak about deixar saudades, leaving saudades behind, matar saudades, killing saudades, and morrer de saudades, dying of saudades. One can be cheio de saudades, full of saudades, rodo de saudades, gnawed of saudades, and morto de saudades, dead of saudades. An adjective formed from saudade, saudoso, can mean feeling saudade or expressing saudade, as in beijo saudoso, a kiss full of sau-dade, used at the end of a letter. There is also an interesting noun saudosismo, which in its more general meaning is some-thing like a nostalgic yearning for the good things of the past. Saudosismo gave its name to a philosophical and literary move-ment in Portugal in the first half of the 20th century, rooted in the work of Teixeira de Pascoaes and the Renascena Portuguesa group.

Cultural Significance of SaudadeIt must be stated very clearly that saudade is not merely a word for a feeling often referred to in Portuguese. It has a unique status: it serves as a descriptor of Portuguese national identity. The Pequeno Dicionrio da Lngua Portuguesa (Figueiredo, 1924/1981, p. 1249) claims that saudade o afecto mais caraterstico da alma portuguesa, saudade is the most characteristic feeling of the Portuguese soul.

Let me quote Pessoa again, as he expressed very neatly the idea of the uniqueness of saudade:

Saudades, s Portuguesesconseguem senti-las bem,porque tm essa palavrapara dizer que as tm!

[Saudades, only Portuguese peopleare able to feel it wellbecause they have a wordto say that they feel it!](Barreto, 1965, p. 490)

Of course, Portuguese people are not necessarily the only ones who can feel saudade; however, the fact that the Portuguese language has a word for this feeling, which seems to fall some-where between happiness and pain, is culturally significant. The famous 17th-century Portuguese writer, Francisco Manuel de Melo explained its pervasiveness as follows:

Amor e ausncia so os pais da saudade; e como nosso natural entre as mais naes conhecido por amoroso, e nossas dilatadas viagens ocasionam as maiores ausncias, da vem, que onde se acha muito amor e ausncia larga, as saudades sejam mais certas.

[Love and absence are the mother and father of saudade. Our people are known as loving among other nations, and our common travels are a cause of many absences, and that is why, where you can find lots of love and long-lasting absence, there the saudade will certainly be.] (Francisco Manuel de Melo, quoted in Roquete & Fonseca, 1974, p. 211)

The main characteristic of saudade is its ambivalence. One often reads that saudade expresses at once anxiety and happi-ness.8 It is called tormento puro, doce e magoado, pure, sweet and painful torment (Cames, quoted in Roquete & Fonseca, 1974, p. 439), mal de que se gosta, bem que se padece, bad thing you like and good thing you suffer from (Francisco Manuel de Melo, quoted in Roquete & Fonseca, 1974, p. 439). Almeida Garrett (17991854), the Portuguese Romanticist poet, called it gosto amargo de infelizes, delicioso pungir de acerbo espinho, a bitter delight of unhappy people, a sweet sting of a wicked thorn (quoted in Morais Silva, 1949, Vol. 9, p. 942).

It is sometimes said that saudade originates from the poca dos Descobrimentos, the epoch of great Portuguese discover-ies, when many of those who departed on journeys to the unknown and never came back, left their families suffering from their absence and longing for their return (yet proud of them).9 Saudade is also often considered to be related to the



myth of sebastianismo, Sebastianism, a kind of Portuguese messianism, which was a very popular belief, lasting until the 19th century, stemming from the loss of King Sebastio in the battle of Alccer Quibir, Morocco in 1578. It was believed that Portugal would be saved and its greatness restored by the returning hero who would reappear on a misty morning (Wheeler, 1993, p. 161). It has even been claimed that it was waiting and feeling saudade for the return of King Sebastio that kept the Portuguese in a state of political inertia for many years (ukaszyk, 2005).

A historical analysis of saudade in Lusophone culture would certainly be worth undertaking; as the article by Farrell (2006) shows, its contemporary meaning seems to be muted when compared with its meaning 100 years ago (and that meaning of an intensive feeling, I believe, is preserved in the traditional fado songs). Such an analysis, however, is beyond the modest scope of the present paper.

Saudade Seen through the Window of FadoI will base the following observations regarding saudade on a corpus of 254 fado songs.10 Fado is a Portuguese urban folk song, typical of the city of Lisbon.11 Its name is said to come from the Latin word fatum which means fate. In order to under-stand the relationship between fado and saudade, we need to consider, briefly, a little of the history of fado.

Fado lisboeta was born in the beginning of the 19th century in the poor districts of Lisbon, Alfama, and Mouraria, as a mix-ture of African Brazilian music brought by the former slaves from Brazil, and Portuguese traditional kinds of music deriving from the medieval cantigas de amigo.12 The beginnings of fado were sad and gloomy. It was sung mostly in casas de fado, or brothels, and in the streets by people whose everyday lives were marked by misery and crime. However, 100 years passed and fado afidalgou-se, made itself an aristocrat (Freitas, 1973, p. 234). At the turn of the 20th century it became popular not only among the aristocracy, but also in the world of theatre. At that time the word fadista no longer meant a prostitute, but was used as a synonym for artista, artist or cantante, singer. During the Salazarian regime, Estado Novo (New State, 19261974) fado acquired corrupt associationsit was used as a form of propaganda, and was called cano nacional, national song. When Amlia Rodrigues, known as Rainha do Fado, or Fado Queen, entered the stage in the late 1930s, fado gained a new and fresh lookAmlia sang songs written by the best Portuguese poets and had many great composers to write for her. Her voice is the best known voice of fado of all time. When Portugal was once again a free state in 1974, after the Revoluo dos Cravos, or Carnation Revolution, fado was widely rejected as something that belonged to the ancient regime; to quote the Historical Dictionary of Portugal (Wheeler, 1993, p. 89): after the 1974 Revolution [that] popular song seemed to be identi-fied as an obsolete, regime-encouraged entertainment that like a drug or soporific encouraged passivity. It was only in the dec-ade of the 1990s, that interest in fado as a classical form of Portuguese folk song was revived. Since then there emerged a new generation of fadistas. Among the world-known are

Caman, Mariza, Dulce Pontes, Msia, and many others. Fado is also sung by ordinary people in casas de fado, or restaurants13, and in the streets.

Fado is perceived as a poetical and musical genre that best expresses the sensibility of the Portuguese soul. An English journalist who travelled through Portugal in the beginning of the 20th century was believed to say:

Este espectculo, que aborreceria at s lgrimas um ingls, deixa os assistentes nativos arrebatados, com os olhos fixos nos cantores, os coraes intumescidos dentro de peito, vibrando todo o seu ser com este amlgama de sentimentos que s os portugueses podem realmente apreciar e ningum mais, do mesmo modo que o roast beef da velha Inglaterra deixaria um portugus frio como uma pedra, assim sucede a um ingls quando ouve o fado.

[This performance, that would bore an Englishman to death, makes the native public enthusiastic. With their eyes fixed on the singers, their hearts pounding in their chests, they vibrate with all their might to the amalgamation of feelings only the Portuguese (and no one else) can fully understand and appreciate. In the same way as roast beef from Old England leaves a Portuguese person stone cold, an Englishman feels while listening to fado.](Moita, 1936, pp. 184185)

He also claimed that the Portuguese favorite word for describing feelings embedded in fado is saudade (Moita, 1936, p. 183). This opinion is shared by fado theorists (Carvalho, 1903/1982; Osrio, 1974). In books and papers about fado, the first word that is encountered is saudade. One may read that fado cannot be sung without saudade (Vernon, 1998). Fado, just like saudade, is based on a falta, missing, loss. People sing it (and listen to it) to release their pain. As Vernon (1998, p. 1) puts it, in much the same way as African-American blues, the Fado acts as a cathartic release for intense human emotions.

In my corpus the lexeme saudade14 appeared 78 times (out of a total of 31,231 word-forms, that is with a high rate of .25%). Let us examine the nave picture15 of saudade as seen in fado songs (Freitas 1973, p. 234):

Despedida

sempre tristonha e ingrata que se torna a despedida de quem temos amizade, mas se a saudade nos mata, eu quero ter muita vida para morrer de saudade.

[Farewell

Saying goodbye to a friendwill always besad and unwanted,but if saudade kills usI want to have lots of lifeto be able to die of saudade]

As we have already seen in the collocations of saudade, it is conceptualized as something really painful and life threaten-ing. That component of something bad is confirmed in fado. Saudade mata, kills, as in the above example, fere, hurts,



atormenta, tortures, one can be its escravo, slave, and andar merc de uma saudade, be at the mercy of saudade.

Canto o fado

Quando a tristeza minvade, canto o fado, se me atormenta saudade, canto o fado.

[I sing fado

When I feel really sadI sing fadowhen the saudade tortures meI sing fado]

Saudade is often personified: saudade nasce, is born, chega, comes, mai do fado, is a mother of fado, one can be her neighbor, viver paredes meias com ela. Saudade is sometimes seen as a LIQUIDa common metaphor for emotions in European languages (Gries & Stefanowitsch, 2006): one can read about gua de saudade, water of saudade and mar de saudade, sea of saudade. One can smell it and one can taste it, as in the following examples:

Alfama

Fechada em seu desencanto Alfama cheira a saudade.

[Alfama

Closed in its disenchantmentAlfama smells of saudade]

Meu amor marinheiroMeu amor disse que eu tinha na boca um gosto a saudade e uns cabelos onde nascem os ventos e a liberdade.

[My beloved one is a sailor

My beloved one said I hada taste of saudade on my lipsand in my hair the windand the freedom were born]

Saudade is often viewed as something valuable, a jewel, jia. It is also something of great volume, ampliou-se at Deus, os astros alcanou, it has grown to touch God and reach the stars (Elegia do amor). To sum up, saudade in fado is an over-whelming and also a very sensual feeling. It is highly valued, and is often used in a positive context: it is good to die of sau-dade, bom que a saudade impere, it is good when saudade rules (Despedida). Interestingly, one can also have saudade de saudade, one can miss the missing, so to speak, and that is the worst thing of all:

Enquanto a Saudade existe,pode haver felicidade,mas no ha nada mais triste,que a Saudade de Saudade.

[There where saudade lives,the happiness can be there too,

but theres nothing worse in that world,that saudade of saudade](Barreto, 1959, p. 22)

NSM Explication of SaudadeSummarizing, there is something very bad and something very good about saudade. One can be killed or tortured by it, but it is also a precious jewel everybody desires. Saudade, viewed through the lens of fado, is also an overwhelming feeling: you cant not think about it. What is very important in the meaning of saudade is the element of thinking, recalling the past and also the positive evaluation of that state of mindit is good to feel saudade.

I believe that a prototypical object of saudade is not a per-son (see Farrell, 2006), but an important personal experience (something happening to me) like loving someone, being young, living where you were born, sharing your thoughts and feelings with someone, doing something exceptional.

I would now like to examine more closely the cognitive sce-nario of that feeling, which I argue is ambivalent or paradoxical.

Tenho saudades de [I have saudades of ]

(a) I think like this:(b) some time before something very good was happen-

ing to me for some time(c) I felt something very good because of this(d) it is not happening now(e) I very much want this to be happening now(f) I know it cant happen anymore(g) this is bad(h) I cant not think about it(i) at the same time I think like this:(j) some time before something very good was happen-

ing to me for some time(k) I felt something very good because of this(l) I can think about it now(m) this is good(n) when I think like this, I feel something like people

often feel when they think like this for a long time(o) it is good if someone can feel something like this

The definition starts with I think to capture the element of nostalgic thoughts that constitute the base for the feeling (a). The cognitive scenario of saudade is that of having ambiguous thoughts about the past. Therefore someone thinks: some time before something very good was happening to me for some time (b) and because of that I was really happy (c). But it is not happening anymore (d), even though this person would like it to be happening (e). There is a trait of Portuguese fatalism (see Osrio, 1974; see also Buat Silva, 2008) in the meaning of saudade (f)16 and an element of something like sadness (g). The overwhelming aspect of saudade is captured in I cant not think about it.

At the same time there is the appreciation of having good experiences (j) and having felt, roughly speaking, happy because



of them in the past (k). Good memories (l) are a reason for a positive feeling now (m). All those thoughts make this someone feel something like people often feel when they think like this for a long time (thus it is a long-lasting feeling). The last component (o) shows the positive connotations that saudade has in Portuguese culture.

Saudade and Other Afflictive Emotion Terms in PortugueseAs for the relationship between saudade and other afflictive feelingsit is not odd to talk about tristeza, roughly sadness, as something good in Portuguese (see Farrell, 2006, p. 248). Compare the following fado lyrics:

Fado fado

Alegria descontente,j Cames soube dizerque ser triste ser contente,no ser assim morrer.no tristeza somenteum certo modo de ser.

[Fado fado

An unhappy pleasure,already Cames knew how to saythat to be sad is to be happy,and not to be sad is to die.and it isnt sadness,it is just a certain way of being](Manuel Alegre)

One of the recent performances in the Teatro Nacional So Joo do Porto bears the title: Sombras, a nossa tristeza uma imensa alegria, or Shadows, our sadness is our great pleas-ure, and in the review of this play in Jornal de Letras, Artes e Ideias we may read: uma certa propenso tpicamente portuguesa de sofrimento tambm se reflecta numa tendncia de vermos a alegria quando destapamos a tristeza, a cer-tain Portuguese tendency to suffer is also reflected in the ten-dency to see joy where we discover sadness (Pinto Queiroz, 2010, p. 25).

I agree with Farrell that saudade is an intense feeling which occurs in the corao, heart. It can be seen as a primary afflictive feeling that can be stimulated by a distant loved one, although not necessarily. As I already said, I consider good past events to be the prototypical object of saudade, based on how the word saudade is used. Let me consider the first example of Farrell (2006, p. 236):

Eu estou com saudades de voc. . . . sempre muito bom quando estamos juntos, e quero voltar a ter esses momentos. Estou com saudades, muitas saudades e espero que breve possamos estar juntos novamente.

For me it is a good example supporting my interpretation of saudade as time- or event-oriented. The speaker (in Farrell,

2006) says Its always so good when we are together, and I want to go back to these moments . I feel saudades, lots of saudades, and I hope that we can be together again soon.

I cant agree with Farrell when he says that English nostalgia and Portuguese nostalgia have the same meaning (2006, p. 253). The reason why they are different is that Portuguese nostalgia has a cognate saudade, which has no counterpart in the English lexi-con. Naturally, the existence of a multitude of words that can be used to describe emotions is reflected in the meanings of those words. And English nostalgia lacks the positive connota-tions that all the afflictive emotions have in the Portuguese culture.

Different Syntactic Frames: Tenho Saudade versus Sinto SaudadeThe phrase I analyzed here is tenho saudades. I chose this particular phrase because it was the most common one in my fado corpus,17 and it also seems to be the most common one in European Portuguese (see Reference Corpus of Contemporary Portuguese, 2010). Let us now look into other syntactic frames and the differences between them.

Except for ter saudade, literally have saudade, one can also sentir saudade, feel saudade and estar com saudade, be with saudade. However, in everyday language the plural form sau-dades is used more often in all the above collocations. The differ-ence between saudade and saudades has been said to be the difference in intensity (the plural form symbolizing the more intense feeling; Farrell, 2006, p. 243).18 It must be stressed here, however, thatat least in the case of the collocation ter sau-dadesit is a component of nostalgic thoughts that plays a key role in the meaning of that phrase. And those thoughts are con-ceptualized as saudades. Thus tenho saudades has a stronger ele-ment of thinking over feeling (it is more recalling ones past than just feeling an emotion) than the other two (estou com sau-dades, sinto saudades), hence the definition starts with I think and not I feel. I base this intuition on the fact that in many examples like tenho saudades do passado, I have saudades of the past, it is hard to decide whether one thinks or feels some-thing. It may be that two meanings of saudade given in the dic-tionaries ([a] memory, [b] feeling) are actually blurred into one.

Sentir saudades is used both in Portuguese and in Brazilian Portuguese, and estar com saudades seems to be used more frequently in Brazil than in Portugal.

Sinto saudades de [I feel saudades of ]

(a) I feel something like people often feel when they think like this:

(b) some time before something very good was happen-ing to me for some time

(c) I felt something very good because of this(d) it is not happening now(e) I very much want this to be happening now(f) I know it cant happen anymore(g) this is bad



(h) at the same time, I feel something like people often feel when they think like this:

(i) some time before something very good was happen-ing to me for some time

(j) I felt something very good because of this(k) I can think about it now(l) this is good(m) it is good if someone can feel something like this

The main difference between tenho saudades and sinto saudades lies in the opening frame. As mentioned earlier, in tenho saudades the definition starts with thinking, in sinto saudades with feeling. The other important difference is for a long time used in line (n) of the first definition. Together with I think it is supposed to picture the nostalgic memories one has when one has saudades.19

Estou com saudades suggests two things. First of all, the personification of saudade: you are with saudade, like you can be with someone. Secondly, when we look at that expres-sion with other names of feelings, we find out that it can occur only with the so-called negative feelings; thus you can be with cimes, jealousy or medo, fear, but you cannot be with alegria, joy (Farrell, 2006, p. 242).

Estou com saudades de [I am with saudades of ]

(a) I feel something bad like people often feel when they think like this:

(b) some time before something very good was happen-ing to me for some time

(c) I felt something very good because of this(d) it is not happening now(e) I very much want this to be happening now(f) I know it cant happen anymore(g) this is bad(h) at the same time, I feel something like people often

feel when they think like this:(i) some time before something very good was happen-

ing to me for some time(j) I felt something very good because of this(k) I can think about it now(l) this is good(m) it is good if someone can feel something like this

Now, the only difference between sinto saudades and estou com saudades is the component I feel something bad, instead of I feel something in the line (a). It is intended to capture the fact that the phrase estou com can only be used with negative emotions.

It is worth noting that in all of the above expressions with saudade the object of the emotion does not have to be specified. One may say tenho saudades or estou com saudades without specifying its cause.

Concluding RemarksIs nostalgia really a bittersweet luxury that one indulges in only infrequently as Frijda (1994a, p. 121) has it? Maybe for the

English speakers it is, but certainly not for the Portuguese. I understand that Frijda is talking from an evolutionary point of view, when he says that nostalgia is a luxury. But claiming that the feeling of nostalgia is infrequent already seems cul-turally and linguistically biased. Considering the importance of saudade in the Lusophone culture, no Portuguese speaker would agree with Frijdas claim. This just underscores the need for a cultural approach to emotions. Izard (2010, p. 368) postulates that to achieve a greater clarity in emotion science, each discrete emotion term should be defined. I think NSM constitutes a well-formed, culturally neutral tertium comparationis, on which such definitions may be built.

As it was shown above, saudade is an important concept in the Portuguese culture. It is not a marginal feeling, it is a basic emotion term going hand in hand with amor, love. Saudade may be viewed as a typically prototypical category, because it covers the whole scale of feelings, from sadness to happiness. The Portuguese claim it has no equivalents in any other lan-guage in the world and regard it as a fundamental and distinc-tive feature of their national identity (Botelho, 1990). Its main characteristic lies in its ambivalencesaudade is both a memory and a feeling; it is both pleasure and pain.

I believe that the research into the lexical meaning of emo-tion terms is important not only for linguists, but also for cog-nitive psychologists (see Ekman & Davidson, 1994, p. 362). As Apresjan and Apresjan (2000, p. 203) write, language con-tains the experience of millennia of psychological and cultural introspection, and its data are every bit as reliable as those pro-vided by experimental research. Many psychologists agree (e.g., Scherer, 1994, p. 31; Frijda, 1994b, p. 59; Paez & Vergara, 1995) that words for emotions should be studied and explained, because their existence indicates the differences between various emotional states.

Without studying emotions that seem marginal from an Anglo point of viewand are considered basic in other cultures (see Shweder & Haidt, 2004, on basic emotions in Sanskrit)we will not be able to see that English emotion terms such as joy, anger, or sadness are as much cultural arti-facts as saudade is (see Izard, 2010; see also Widen & Russell, 2010; Wierzbicka, 1995).

Notes 1 All the translations from Portuguese are my own. 2 Fernando Pessoa (18881935) was a Portuguese modernist poet,

bilingual in English and Portuguese. 3 Semantic molecules are bigger chunks of knowledge. They are usu-

ally words that have proven to be useful in the explication of many other words, for example, woman, eat, animal, home (see also Goddard & Wierzbicka, 2002).

4 It must be noted here that semantic primes exist as meanings of lexical units (not lexemes) (Wierzbicka, 2009). A lexical unit is defined as a pairing of a single specifiable meaning with a lexical form (Goddard, 2001, p. 2).

5 It is worth noting that the Portuguese equivalents of these three words, fado, alma, and saudade, seem to have the same status in Portuguese (see Buat Silva, 2006).

6 It can also be used to refer to a kind of sailors song and different plants of the Scabiosa family.



7 I found an accurate definition of saudade on the Internet. It describes precisely the elements of love, pain, and fate inherent to the meaning of saudade: the feeling of missing something you love while knowing that its likelihood of return is unknowable and entirely left to fate (Portuguese Blog, 2007).

8 Ela exprime um sentimento de angstia e simultaneamente felici-dade (Barreto, 1959, p. 22). See also Guimares (1992, pp. 9697): a saudade possui uma notvel ambivalncia, saudade is signifi-cantly ambivalent.

9 There are also authors who claim that saudade is much older and actually is one of the reasons for the great Portuguese discoveries (see Botelho, 1990).

10 It is a corpus I collected for my PhD dissertation.11 There are also fados originating from Coimbra, but they belong to a

slightly different genre.12 It is said that the very first manifestations of saudade in poetry were

those medieval cantigas (Botelho, 1990, p. 136).13 The meaning of the expression casas de fado changed with time and

now there is nothing indecent about them, they are common restau-rants where the fado is sung.

14 In the singular 55 times, and in the plural (saudades) 23 times.15 By nave, I dont mean simplified, but common, shared by many

people, as opposed to scientific (Apresjan, 1974/1992, 1994). In that particular context it will be a linguistic picture of saudade that emerges from the fado songs.

16 Sometimes one can have saudade do que ainda no aconteceu, saudade for something that hasnt happened yet or even do futuro, for the future. That relates to the element of something absolutely impossible inherent to the meaning of saudade.

17 The phrase tenho saudades appeared in my corpus five times; tenho saudade, three times; sinto saudades, four times; sinto saudade, once. The phrase estou com saudade(s) has not appeared at all.

18 Compare also: i can say its a kind of plural used just to try to make stronger i mean: if u want to say u r REALLY missing (feeling saudade) someone, u use saudades! (original spelling preserved) (http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070718042529Aadrtbd) (definition no longer available on line).

19 There is also one missing component: I cant not think about it, but I believe that it belongs only to the linguistic picture of saudade in fado.

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