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

摘要

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.