Analysis of Indirect Uses of Interrogative Sentences Carrying Anger

Analysis of Indirect Uses of Interrogative Sentences Carrying Anger * Hye-Jin Min and Jong C. Park Computer Science Division EECS Department, KAIST 373-1 Guseong-dong, Yuseong-gu Daejeon 305-701 South Korea {hjmin, park}@nlp.kaist.ac.kr Abstract. Interrogative sentences are generally used to perform speech acts of directly asking a question or making a request, but they are also used to convey such speech acts indirectly. In the utterances, such indirect uses of interrogative sentences usually carry speaker’s emotion with a negative attitude, which is close to an expression of anger. The identification of such negative emotion is known as a difficult problem that requires relevant information in syntax, semantics, discourse, pragmatics, and speech signals. In this paper, we argue that the interrogatives used for indirect speech acts could serve as a dominant marker for identifying the emotional attitudes, such as anger, as compared to other emotion-related markers, such as discourse markers, adverbial words, and syntactic markers. To support such an argument, we analyze the dialogues collected from the Korean soap operas, and examine individual or cooperative influences of the emotion-related markers on emotional realization. The user study shows that the interrogatives could be utilized as a promising device for emotion identification. Keywords: Interrogative sentences, Wh-words, Emotion identification, Anger 1. Introduction Every utterance has its illocutionary force that makes the hearers to act a certain behavior, in accordance with the speaker’s intentions, such as assertives, directives, commissives, expressives and declarations (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969). The actions induced by such intentions, or speech acts, are systematically related to particular types of a sentential form uttered by the speaker (Levelt, 1989). However, these relations do not appear quite strict because speech acts with a particular sentential form could be dependent upon prosodic and paralinguistic devices. For instance, interrogative sentences are not only used for asking a question or making a request directly to the hearers, but also perform speech acts indirectly, including rejection, refutation, and reproach. In particular, in an utterance, such indirect speech acts could also carry the speaker’s psychological attitude (Kim, 2003), as shown in the following utterance. (1) A: 어서 그에게 가서 잘못을 사과해. (Promptly apologize to him for your fault.)1 * This research was performed for the Intelligent Robotics Development Program, one of the 21st Century Frontier R&D Programs, and Brain Science Research Center, funded by the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy of Korea. Copyright 2007 by Hye-Jin Min and Jong C. Park 1 The transcriptions in English are placed in round brackets. 311 B: 사과라구요? 내가 왜 사과하는데요? 잘못한 사람이 누군데? (Apology? Why do I have to apologize to him? Who did something wrong?) Example (1) contains the interrogatives ‘왜(why)’ and ‘누군데(who)’ to convey an indirect speech act that the speaker B rejects the proposal of the speech partner A, carrying a negative attitude in the utterance. Similarly, in the most utterances of soap opera, the indirect speech act with such psychological attitudes is much closer to the negative emotion, such as anger, than to the positive emotion, such as joy. …

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