Exclamative Sentences in Emotion Expressions in Mandarin Chinese: A Corpus-based Approach

Exclamative Sentences in Emotion Expressions in Mandarin Chinese: A Corpus-based Approach Xuefeng Gao Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Hong Kong Xue-feng.gao@connect.polyu.hk Sophia Yat-Mei Lee Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Hong Kong ym.lee@polyu.edu.hk Abstract Emotions are found to be frequently involved in the exclamative sentences. This paper aims to examine the interaction between exclama- tive sentences and emotions in Chinese social media. We propose that exclamative sentences can express all kinds of emotions besides sur- prise. Fear emotion is mostly expressed in ex- clamative sentences. Lexical features, structural features and discourse features are analyzed to reveal a full picture of linguistic cues in emotion expressions in exclamative sentences. We believe that this study could pro- vide a new approach for the study of sentence types in Mandarin Chinese, which is also cru- cial for people to understand the expressions of human emotions. 1 Introduction Exclamative sentences are often related to high- lighting emotion information, especially the sense of surprise. As one of the main four sentence types, the study of exclamative sentences in Mandarin Chinese is often neglected. The current study aims to examine the interac- tion between exclamative sentences and different emotion types based on an emotion corpus of Chi- nese social media Weibo. We explore the represen- tations of emotions in terms of lexical features, structural features and discourse feature when ex- clamative sentences are employed. This paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we give an overview of the previous studies in rela- tion to emotion expression and exclamative sen- tences. Section 3 presents the corpus data and anno- tation scheme. In Section4, we report the data analysis. Finally, we conclude the paper in Section 5. 2 Related Work 2.1 Emotion Analysis Emotions are part of people’s daily life and have been studied in many different disciplines, but the definition of emotion is diverse and debatable (James, 1884; Watson, 1924; Cannon, 1929; Plutchik, 1962; Bowlby, 1969; Lazarus, 1975; Frijda, 1986; Ortony et al., 1988; Harkins and Wierzbicka, 2001). The classification of emotion is another contentious issue. Researchers have pro- posed different approaches to grouping the basic emotions (Plutchik, 1980; Ekman, 1984; Turner, 2000; Sabini and Silver, 2005; Keltner et al., 2014; Scheff, 2015). In our study, we will follow the emo- tion classification proposed by Turner (2000). He identified five primary emotions, namely happiness, sadness, fear, anger and surprise. Emotion words are normally classified into two types: expressive emotion words and descriptive emotion words (Köveces, 2000). Expressive emo- tion words express emotions directly, while descrip- tive emotion words are words that describe emotions. There are two ways to express emotions: explicit and implicit (Lee, 2015). Explicit emotion refers to the emotion-related information which is presented by emotion keywords, while it is con- veyed via inferences or connotation instead of emo- tion keywords in implicit emotion. Implicit PACLIC 32 172 32nd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation Hong Kong, 1-3 December 2018 Copyright 2018 …

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