Questions as a Pre-event, Pivot Event and Post-event of Emotions

Questions as a Pre-event, Pivot Event and Post-event of Emotions Helena Yan Ping Lau† Sophia Yat Mei Lee† Zhongqing Wang‡ †Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies ‡Natural Language Processing Lab The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Soochow University Hong Kong China helena.lau@connect.polyu.hk;ym.lee@polyu.edu.hk; wangzq@suda.edu.cn Abstract This paper examines the use of information-seeking questions and rhetorical questions in terms of event structures of emotion. An emotion is treated as a pivot event that links the emotion-inducing event (i.e. pre- event) and the event induced by emotion (i.e. post- event). We investigate the role information-seeking questions and rhetorical questions play in the three sub- events. Results show that the overall distributions of the two types of questions used to mark the three sub-events are rather similar. This indicates that both types of questions play an equally important role in emotion expressions. It is found that more than a half (55.6%) of emotion-related questions are used to express emotions, approximately one-third of the questions (36.3%) are used to describe pre-events and the remaining 8.1% are the post-events of emotions. Various linguistic features of pre-events, pivot events and post-events of different emotions are proposed for emotion identification. We believe that this linguistic account of questions in emotion expressions will provide a clearer picture of the nature of emotion, and add rich dimensions to emotion analysis. 1 Introduction Emotion, be it positive or negative, is a way that individuals interact with the others. Emotion can be communicated by means of words, facial expressions, or bodily reactions etc. In this study, we study emotions in text, with the major focus being placed on a particular clause type – question. Questions can mainly be classified into two types, namely information-seeking questions (IQs) and rhetorical questions (RQs). Information-seeking questions, as suggested by its name, generally aim to make a request for information or for an answer, while rhetorical questions, expecting no answer, aim to achieve a pragmatic goal, such as to emphasize, to persuade, to show emotions etc. (Frank 1990; Roberts and Kreuz 1994). Previous research on the interactions between questions and emotions has extensively focused on rhetorical questions as they usually convey a more complicated meaning that goes beyond the literal. Little work has been done on the correlation between information-seeking questions and emotions. In an attempt to explore whether or not information-seeking questions do play no part in emotion expressions, this paper offers a linguistic account of the use of information-seeking questions and rhetorical questions in expressing emotions using an event-based approach. We take the position that emotion is a pivot event that interacts with its associated events, namely pre- events (i.e. emotion causes), and post events (i.e. reactions to emotion) (Lee et al. 2012). This paper aims to address the following questions: 1) How frequently are information-seeking questions and rhetorical questions used in the three sub-events of emotion? 2) Which position do the subevents introduced by questions often occur in an emotion expression? 3) Do emotions have different preferences for a particular question type over the other …

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