Questions as a pre-event, pivot event and post-event of emotions

Abstract

This paper examines the use of information-seekingquestions and rhetorical questions in terms of eventstructures of emotion. An emotion is treated as a pivotevent that links the emotion-inducing event (i.e. preevent) and the event induced by emotion (i.e. postevent). We investigate the role information-seekingquestions and rhetorical questions play in the three subevents. Results show that the overall distributions of thetwo types of questions used to mark the three sub-eventsare rather similar. This indicates that both types ofquestions play an equally important role in emotionexpressions. It is found that more than a half (55.6%) ofemotion-related questions are used to express emotions,approximately one-third of the questions (36.3%) areused to describe pre-events and the remaining 8.1% arethe post-events of emotions. Various linguistic featuresof pre-events, pivot events and post-events of differentemotions are proposed for emotion identification. Webelieve that this linguistic account of questions inemotion expressions will provide a clearer picture of thenature of emotion, and add rich dimensions to emotionanalysis.