Language, emotion, and the emotions: The multidisciplinary and linguistic background

Abstract

Emotion and the emotions we study today have been discussed for centuries using words and phrases that reflect the thoughts of those times, but that have also become fossilised in modern Western thought. The concepts behind these expressions vary in content according to the context in which they are used, and their translations into other languages show that their usage, or that of their cognates, in each language allows for further different interpretations of the concepts, often influenced by the culture and society in which they are used. The studies of Emotion and Language are influenced by perspectives from the disciplines of philosophy, anthropology, psychology, sociology, neuroscience, and computer science, and cover not just the spoken or written form of the core concepts of emotion, but also descriptions of the expression of emotion through facial expression, body language, and physical reactions, and even subjective language in general. This article will attempt to provide a view of some of the issues that affect the understanding of the language of emotion, and that underlie many of the problems faced by those working in opinion mining, sentiment analysis, and human<>computer interaction. It will also touch on the complex relationship between emotion and cognition, and the problems this poses. The objective is to offer some interdisciplinary background for our second article, which presents a more detailed perspective from a computational point of view.

Broad coverage emotion annotation

“…An important clarification is probably needed here. One of our main interests is the comparison of different languages, as motivated in Maia and Santos (2018); Santos and Maia (2018). But selecting arbitrarily some emotions, like for example Plaza del Arco et al (2020) did, does not allow one to identify how different languages work.…”

“…Although we think our work is quite unique in scope and method, we provide here a short overview of similar or related work for other languages here. We will not review here the ways emotion as been described or categorized throughout history or in computer science, since this has recently been done in Maia and Santos (2018) and Santos and Maia (2018) respectively, but will deal solely with corpus annotation and its evaluation. Aman and Szpakowicz (2007) (for English), who defined clearly an ''emotion annotation task'' that is categorical.…”

“…-There is no consensual set of emotion categories (neither for Portuguese nor for any other language), as has been argued by Santos and Maia (2018); Maia and Santos (2018). -Since emotions are abstract, the verbs that describe them are often used in a concrete (and non emotional) sense (e.g.…”

Clustering emotions in Portuguese

“…We do not follow a particular theory of what an emotion is in psychological or physiological terms, and limit ourselves to the linguistic properties of emotion words. For surveys of other approaches and discussion of several theories, see the works by Maia and Santos (2018) and Santos and Maia (2018).…”

Emotion concepts for representing the vicissitudes of fate in Markus Zusak’s “Bridge of Clay”

“…They primarily focus on what makes humans react to certain stimuli and how those reactions affect us. However, there has recently been a surge of interest in the emotional content of language and ways and forms of expression of emotions in a text by linguistics as the emotional function of language is among the key ones (Maia & Santos, 2018), and a text contains not only cognitive or aesthetic but also emotional information, as Dijkstra et al (1995) stress. The ways and means of expressing emotions may differ depending on the type of text, the time of its creation, and the relevant linguistic culture (Wildgen, 2004).…”