Surprise in Agnès Celle Paris Diderot University

Tracking emotions in poses several challenges to a linguist. Firstly, speakers do not necessarily verbalize their emotions. Secondly, emotion lexemes describe emotions but do not necessarily express them (Kövecses 2000, 2017). Thirdly speakers may express emotions as part of a conversation routine without actually experiencing them (Wilkinson and Kitzinger 2006). Surprise is a case in point. In some languages, surprise is expressed by a mirative morpheme (DeLancey 1997, 2001). In English, surprise adjectives and nouns are not commonly used to express genuine surprise (Celle et al. 2017). Surprise is expressed by interjections, swear words, emotive modifiers, exclamations (Michaelis 2001), questions (Kay & Fillmore 1999, Michaelis & Feng 2015) and certain constructions (Celle & Lansari 2015). This talk reports on a study based on the annotation of surprise episodes in three films cripts drawn from the OpenSubtitle Corpus. Interrogative structures were found to be the most frequent expression of surprise. The high frequency of interrogative structures (as opposed to declarative and exclamative structures) can be related to the epistemic and cognitive status of surprise (Meyer et al. 1997, Reisenzein 2000), which sets it apart from other emotions. Constituent interrogatives in surprise contexts were found to be three times more frequent than polar interrogatives, which confirms that polar interrogatives are less apt to express surprise (Siemund 2017), although they are known to outnumber constituent interrogatives in standard communication contexts (Stivers 2010).

Interrogatives used in reaction to an unexpected event may be either direct speech acts or acts. In addition to expressing surprise, the former seek information, as opposed to the latter. I argue that questioning plays an important role in the cognitive integration of surprising information. This cognitive integration can be achieved along a cline that goes from clarification requests to ordinary questions and inferential questions. These surprise questions are mainly induced by linguistic information. They correspond to “stance follows” (Du Bois 2007) taken in reaction to a discourse content from the addressee.

Interrogatives used as indirect speech acts do not have the illocutionary force of questions as they are not information-seeking, nor do they aim to increase the speaker’s knowledge. Their epistemic status is therefore different. I on two types of questions: rhetorical questions, i.e. questions that contain their own resolution (Ginzburg 2012), and “unresolvable” questions (what the hell is this?), i.e. questions that implicate that no resolution can be found. I show that emotion-induced rhetorical questions serve an argumentative function whereby the addressee is asked to commit to a that the speaker does not commit to in a direct way. They offer a pragmatic means to reduce the belief discrepancy associated with the experience of surprise. Unresolvable questions tend to be generated by evidence judged incongruous. They are speaker-oriented, often self-addressed, the speaker attempting to emotionally adapt to an incongruous situation without expecting an answer from an addressee. I show that interjections and emotive modifiers encode speaker perspective in the same way as evidentials in other languages (San Roque et al. 2017).

References

Celle, A. (In press). « Questions as indirect speech acts in surprise contexts » in Ayoun D., A. Celle & L. Lansari (eds.) Tense, aspect, modality, : crosslinguistic perspectives. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Celle, A., A. Jugnet, L. Lansari, & E. L’Hôte (2017). Expressing and Describing surprise. In A. Celle & L. Lansari (eds), Expressing and Describing surprise. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 215-244. Celle, A. & L. Lansari (2015) On the mirative meaning of aller + compared with its equivalents in English. Taming the TAME systems, Cahiers Chronos n°27, 289-305

DeLancey, S. (1997). : The Grammatical Marking of Unexpected Information. (1). 33-52.

DeLancey, S. (2001). The Mirative and Evidentiality. Journal of 33 (3): 369–82.

Du Bois, J. (2007). The stance triangle. In Robert Englebretson (ed.) Stancetaking in Discourse. Subjectivity, evaluation, interaction (pp. 139-182). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Ginzburg, J. (2012). The Interactive Stance: Meaning for Conversation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kay, Paul, and Charles J. Fillmore (1999) Grammatical constructions and linguistic generalizations: The ‘What’s X doing Y?‘ Construction. Language, 75, 1–33.

Kövecses, Z. (2000). Metaphor and emotion. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press.

Kövecses Z. 2017 (2017) Surprise as a conceptual category. In A. Celle & L. Lansari (eds), Expressing and Describing surprise. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 7-26.

Meyer, W.U., Reisenzein R. and A. Schützwohl (1997). Toward a Process Analysis of Emotions: The Case of Surprise. Motivation and Emotion, 21/3, 251-274.

Michaelis, L. (2001). Exclamative Constructions. In M. Haspelmath, E. König, W. Österreicher & W. Raible (Eds), Language Typology and Language Universals: An International Handbook. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 1038–50.

Michaelis, L. & H. Feng (2015). What is this, sarcastic ? Constructions and Frames 7/2, 148-180.

Reisenzein, R. (2000). Exploring the Strength of Association between the Components of Emotion Syndromes: The Case of Surprise. Cognition and Emotion 14/1, 1-38.

San Roque, L., S. Floyd, E. Norcliffe (2017). Evidentiality and interrogativity. , 186-187, 120-143. doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2014.11.003.

Siemund P. (2017) Interrogative in English and the social economics of questions. Journal of Pragmatics 199, 15-32. DOI 10.1016/j.pragma.2017.07.010.

Stivers, T. (2010). An overview of the -response in American English conversation. Journal of Pragmatics, 42(10), 2620-2626.

Wilkinson, S. and Kitzinger, C. (2006) Surprise as an interactional achievement: Reaction tokens in conversation. Social Psychology Quarterly, 69 (2). 150-182.

Corpus:

Opensubtitles http://opus.nlpl.eu/OpenSubtitles.php Tools:

Glozz Antoine Widlöcher, Yann Mathet. The Glozz platform: a corpus annotation and mining tool. Concolato, Cyril and Schmitz, Patrick. Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Document Engineering (DocEng'12), Sep 2012, Paris, France. pp.171-180, 2012. 〈hal-01023774〉