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DOI: https://doi.org/10.63345/ijrhs.net.v13.i8.4
Dr Amit Kumar Jain
DCSE, Roorkee Institute of Technology
Roorkee, Uttarakhand, India
amitkumarjain.cse@ritrroorkee.com
Abstract
Emotive expression in poetry operates as a deeply nuanced mechanism through which writers convey their most intimate affective experiences, cultural memories, and identity constructions. In multilingual poetry—where two or more languages are interwoven within a single creative work—the terrain for affective articulation becomes even more complex. Poets leverage their bilingual or multilingual repertoires to evoke distinct emotional registers that might be inaccessible in a strictly monolingual context. This study situates itself at the intersection of psycholinguistics and literary analysis to examine how multilingual poets orchestrate emotional impact through strategic language alternation, and how readers perceive and resonate with these emotive cues. Building on foundational theories of emotion processing in bilingual speakers—such as the emotional grounding hypothesis and the differential physiological responses to L1 versus L2—this research employs a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design. The first phase comprises a quantitative corpus analysis of 150 contemporary poems drawn from English–Spanish, English–Hindi, and English–Mandarin traditions. Each poem was systematically coded for language switch points, frequency and intensity of high-arousal emotion words (as catalogued by the NRC Emotion Lexicon), metaphor density, and phonological devices such as alliteration and assonance. Coding reliability was ensured through independent dual coding (Cohen’s κ = .89). The second phase engages 200 readers in a reader-response survey. Participants rated emotional intensity at designated switch points on a 1–7 Likert scale and provided open-ended reflections on their affective experience.
Keywords
Multilingual Poetry, Emotive Expression, Psycholinguistics, Code-Switching, Emotional Resonance
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