Resumen de Emotions in the cross-fire: Structuralist vs. post-structuralist stances in bilingualism research

Claire Kramsch

• What Aneta Pavlenko discusses in this fascinating article is so widely researched, so cogently conceptualized and so richly reflected upon, that one feels like a spoilsport to bring up a debate which the author herself claims to have avoided, namely the “universalist/relativist debate about basic emotions”. If I do so in this Commentary, it is not to invalidate the large body of work in cross-cultural psychology and cross-cultural semantics that Pavlenko refers to, nor to put into question the wealth of data she and Jean-Marc Dewaele have collected through their international webquestionnaire, but to bring to the fore the dilemma in which any bilingual researcher of bilingualism finds herself.