How do discourse markers indicate emotions?

Abstract

Emotions are found to be frequently indicated by discourse markers. This paper aims to examine the interaction between discourse markers and emotions in Chinese social media. We propose that there are two types of emotion-switching when discourse markers are used. Discourse markers are one of the most important cues to indicate negative emotions, such as anger and sadness. Different discourse marker types tend to mark different emotions. Textual discourse markers are most frequently used to indicate emotions. Subjective discourse markers and textual discourse markers tend to indicate sadness emotion, while anger emotion is mostly highly marked by interpersonal discourse markers. Implicit emotions are frequently applied after the discourse markers. We believe this study could provide a better understanding of the representations of human emotions, which is also essential for study of other disciplines. The findings will have implications for linguistic theory as well as emotion classification studies.