Review of Cognitive Linguistics. Published under the auspices of the Spanish Cognitive Linguistics Association - Volume 13, Issue 2, 2015

This paper is an introduction to this special issue on the description and expression of surprise. In line with the ANR-funded project it is part of, this volume aims to bridge the gap between emotion, cognition and linguistics. It stresses the unique status of surprise among emotions, uncovering the link between surprise and epistemicity. Drawing upon the traditional distinction between the description and expression of emotions made by scholars of different persuasions, it argues for a better definition of expressivity as a category in its own right, possibly independent of the expression of spontaneous emotion. This paper also provides a presentation of the eight contributions the volume is made up of.

In this paper, I examine the concept of surprise from a cognitive linguistic perspective. As previous studies indicate, surprise is a not-quite-prototypical emotion category. My focus will be on the structure and content of surprise as an emotion category, as this can be revealed on the basis of the language speakers of English use to talk about it. As regards methodology, I will follow my earlier work and employ a “lexical approach” to emotion concepts (see, e.g., Kövecses, 1986, 1990, 2000) to explore the language-based folk model of surprise in English. I will investigate the conceptual metaphors and metonymies associated with surprise and will propose a cognitive model for the emotion. It is hoped that this methodology enables us to see why surprise is not a prototypical emotion concept on a par with, for example, anger or fear.

This study is conducted using the NSM (Natural Semantic Metalanguage) methodology, which seeks to explicate complex language-specific concepts into configurations of simple universal concepts (Goddard, 2011; Goddard & Wierzbicka, 2014a; cf. Ye, 2013). The study has three main dimensions. It begins by turning the lens of NSM semantic analysis onto a set of words that are central to the “discourse of the unexpected” in English: surprised, amazed, astonished and shocked. By elucidating their precise meanings, we can gain an improved picture of the English folk model in this domain. A comparison with Malay (Bahasa Melayu) shows that the “surprise words” of English lack precise equivalents in other languages (cf. Goddard, 1997). The second dimension involves grammatical semantics, seeking to identify the semantic relationships between agnate word-sets such as: surprised, surprising, to surprise; amazed, amazing, to amaze. The third dimension is a theoretical one, concerned with the goal of developing a typology of “surprise-like” concepts. It is argued that adopting English-­specific words, such as surprise or unexpected, as descriptive categories inevitably leads to conceptual Anglocentrism (Wierzbicka, 2014). The alternative, non-Anglocentric strategy relies on components phrased in terms of universal semantic primes, such as ‘something happened’ and ‘this someone didn’t know that it will happen’, and the like.

The aim of this paper is to investigate how evidentials are used to reflect the unprepared mind of the speaker. Lexical evidentials are typically used by speakers to encode the kinds of evidence they have for making statements about states, events and actions they did not personally witness or were a part of. However, under certain conditions evidentials can be used to express the surprise of the speaker. This is known in the literature under the label mirativity. The empirical factors that condition the mirative use of an evidential are first determined, and then using an information and schema-theoretic analysis it is shown that mirativity is the linguistic reflex of a series of mental events involving the processing of new information, coupled with other contextual factors involving speaker knowledge.

This study focuses on the conceptual category of mirativity and its constructional construal in English. We propose an operationalization of mirativity with a view to investigating the phenomenon within the usage-based quantitative methodology of multifactorial analysis (Geeraerts, Grondelaers, & Bakema, 1994; Gries, 2003). The proposed operationalization is founded on two usage dimensions, i.e., the degree of performativity of the utterance and the degree of incongruity of the described event. It is argued that mirativity, in its prototypical form, can be operationally defined as a combination of high levels of these two variables. The feasibility of this operationalization in usage-based quantitative research is tested in a case study investigating three surprise-encoding constructions in English: [what + the + np], [what + a + np] and [to + my + np]. The data, amounting to 350 observations of the three constructions, were extracted from dialogic online diaries and submitted to detailed manual annotation and subsequent multivariate statistical modeling. The results reveal a usage continuum ranging from [what + the + np] through [to + my + np] to [what + a + np] relative to the high degrees of performativity and incongruity.

This paper investigates how Italian native speakers express surprise in English as their second language on Facebook. A qualitative study was conducted on a corpus of forty English utterances by Italian native speakers conveying surprise and two control corpora composed of forty Italian and forty English native speakers’ expressions. First, a systemic approach will be adopted: by analysing the order in which the speaker reacts to, comments on, and wonders about new information, the objective is to determine a pattern peculiar to the verbal expression of surprise, and to ascertain how the mother tongue and the language-learning background are influential when expressing an instinctive reaction such as surprise in a foreign language. Attention will then be paid to the lexical expression of surprise. In particular, the analysis will focus on the features specific to non-native speakers (i.e. use of verbs and code-switching), on the codes peculiar to CMC (i.e. smileys and punctuation), and on how these codes are employed to convey surprise disruption, valence and intensity. By examining all these aspects, this research examines how English non-native speakers express surprise in chats.

Emotions are almost absent from scientific articles except surprise, which plays a specific role in this genre. Surprise markers such as contrairement à nos attentes (‘contrary to our expectations’) or ce résultat relativement surprenant (‘this somewhat surprising result’) are used in the framework of a scientific prediction model, implicit or explicitly formulated. A corpus linguistic study of adjectival and verbal markers allows us to determine several trends: (a) contrary to other genres such as novels or newspaper articles, surprise is not polar, that is to say it is neither positive nor negative, but stylistically “neutral”, (b) surprise is far more source-oriented than experiencer-oriented, (c) surprise generally involves the reader as a witness, and contributes, with other rhetorical markers, to “interlocutive” dialogism, (d) surprise often occurs in a prefabricated discursive scenario including several steps: (i) prediction model, (ii) observed facts, (iii) expression of surprise (or absence of surprise), (iv) explanation of surprising facts. Finally, we can question the status of surprise as an affect in scientific writing. It seems to be more a state of consciousness associated with the observation of complex facts. In any case, it appears to be a complex state, with rich conceptual content.

This paper analyses surprise in the framework of the GRID paradigm as part of a research project on the meaning of emotion words across languages and cultures. Based on psychological component theories of emotion, an online instrument was designed to rate the meaning of 24 emotion terms on 142 features of emotion. Data was collected for 23 languages in 27 countries. The mean rates within and across languages offer a semantic profile of the emotion terms. Results are presented on the meaning of “surprise” across languages and in English and French. The data also indicate four dimensions are necessary to describe the emotion space: valence, power, arousal and novelty. Novelty captures variation in suddenness and expectedness and differentiates surprise from other emotions, as well as types of emotion within a family, revealing itself as a relevant aspect of emotion universally encoded in our affective lexicons.

Affective Computing aims at improving the naturalness of human-computer interactions by integrating the socio-emotional component in the interaction. The use of embodied conversational agents (ECAs) – virtual characters interacting with humans – is a key answer to this issue. On the one hand, the ECA has to take into account the human emotional behaviours and social attitudes. On the other hand, the ECA has to display socio-emotional behaviours with relevance. In this paper, we provide an overview of computational methods used for user’s socio-emotional behaviour analysis and of human-agent interaction strategies by questioning the ambivalent status of surprise. We focus on the computational models and on the methods we use to detect user’s emotion through language and speech processing and present a study investigating the role of surprise in the ECA’s answer.