Language and emotion

"A world experienced without any affect would be a pallid, meaningless world. We would know that things happened, but we could not care whether they did or not" (Tomkins 1979: 203, cited in Planalp 1999: 9).

Much of our theoretical machinery in linguistics is geared towards the referential functions of language. And while these functions are important, our focus on them has left other realms of language underdeveloped. 

Speakers use language to express their attitudes towards the things they are talking about and the people they are speaking to. Pragmatists move us behind reference and sociolinguists bring us into the social, yet neither really has much to say about the emotive function of language, which "flavors to some extent all our utterances, on their phonic, grammatical, and lexical level" (Jakobson 1960: 354). 

The phrase "language and emotion" covers a wide range of topics--this page collects essays and reading notes that pursue a number of different angles. 
 

My dissertation

Emotions are relational: Positioning and the use of affective linguistic resources
 

Presentations

I gave a presentation on "Affective patterns using words and emoticons in Twitter" at NWAV 40 at Georgetown, October 30, 2011.  

Check out my presentation, "Studying emotion in the field" at Berkeley's Fieldwork Forum, October 19, 2011.  

"The emotional profile of words" at LLACAN's annual scientific meeting in Paris (December 10, 2010--this is the Langage, Langues et Cultures d'Afrique Noire a group within CNRS).  

My November 17, 2010 talk at Nuance is here: Introduction to emotion detection.

My November 4, 2010 NWAV presentation talks about emotion, too: Variation in speech tempo: Capt. Kirk, Mr. Spock, and all of us in between.

And here's the abstract for my October 15, 2010 talk at the California Universities Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop (CUSP): The structure of the affective lexicon.
 

Essays

The following essays pursue themes more than theses. 

• Affect and accommodation
• Intonational melodies and emotion
• Ideophones and emotion
• Stance, style, and emotion
• Mapping language and basic emotions
• Dimensions of emotion
• Words that get reactions: exploring The Experience Project corpus
• Measuring emotion in a conversation (the "awesome" pilot)
• "Emotion" in major linguistics journals since 2005
• Conversational engagement: psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics together
• Emotion in pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and computational linguistics
• Positioning interlocutors with little nudges and shoves
• Power and linguistics
• Collected notes: What is anger?

Reading notes

You can find notes for all of these citations in this folder.

The formatting for these reading notes is a little odd--the left and right columns are unrelated (so you read straight down). I put in citation counts mostly pre-2012. A surprising number of these seem to have grown, whether through additional citations or a change in Google Scholar's algorithms, I haven't researched.

Amir, N., & Cohen, R. (2007). Characterizing Emotion in the Soundtrack of an Animated Film: Credible or Incredible? Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction, 148–158. Cited by 11.

Ang, J., Dhillon, R., Krupski, A., Shriberg, E., & Stolcke, A. (2002). Prosody-based automatic detection of annoyance and frustration in human-computer dialog. In Seventh International Conference on Spoken Language Processing. Cited by 382.

Barrett, L. F. (2006). Solving the emotion paradox: Categorization and the experience of emotion. Personality and social psychology review, 10(1), 20. Cited by 168. 

Bednarek, Monika. (2008). Emotion Talk Across Corpora. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Cited by 208.

Benus, S., Gravano, A., & Hirschberg, J. (2007). Prosody, emotions, and…‘whatever’. In Proceedings of International Conference on Speech Communication and Technology (pp. 2629–2632). Cited by 11.

Benveniste, E. (1971). Subjectivity in language. Problems in general linguistics, 223–230. Cited by 270. 

Ben-Ze'ev, A. (2000). The subtlety of emotions. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Cited by 307. 

Besnier, N. (1990). Language and Affect. Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol 19, pp. 419-451. Cited by 153. 

Biadsy, F., Rosenberg, A., Carlson, R., Hirschberg, J., & Strangert, E. (2008). A Cross-Cultural Comparison of American, Palestinian, and Swedish Perception of Charismatic Speech. Proc. Speech Prosody, Campinas Brazil. Cited by 17.

Biber, D., & Finegan, E. (1988). Adverbial stance types in English. Discourse Processes, 11(1), 1–34. Cited by 104. 

Brown, P. and S. Levinson. (1987). Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cited by 6,499. 

Bucholtz, Mary. (2009). From Stance to Style: Gender, Interaction, and Indexicality in Mexican Immigrant Youth Slang. In Alexandra Jaffe (ed) Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pp. 146-170. Cited by 128.

Buck, R. (1984). The communication of emotion. New York: Guilford Press. Cited by 695. 

Çetin, O., & Shriberg, E. (2006). Analysis of overlaps in meetings by dialog factors, hot spots, speakers, and collection site: insights for automatic speech recognition. In Proceedings ICSLP (pp. 2281-2284). Pittsburgh. Cited by 24.

Clavel, C., Vasilescu, I., & Devillers, L. (2011). Fiction support for realistic portrayals of fear-type emotional manifestations. Computer Speech & Language, 25(1), 63 - 83. Cited by 5.

Cowie, R., & Cornelius, R. R. (2003). Describing the emotional states that are expressed in speech. Speech Communication, 40(1-2), 5–32. Cited by 288.  

Damasio, A. (2006/1994). Descartes' error: emotion, reason and the human brain. London: Vintage. Cited by 349.

Du Bois, J. W. (2007). The stance triangle. In Stancetaking in discourse: Subjectivity, evaluation, interaction (pp. 139–182). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Cited by 842.

Ekman, P., & Davidson, R. J. (Eds.). (1994). The nature of emotion. New York: Oxford University Press. Cited by 225. 

Enos, F., Shriberg, E., Graciarena, M., Hirschberg, J., & Stolcke, A. (2007). Detecting deception using critical segments. In Proceedings Interspeech (pp. 1621-1624). Antwerp. Cited by 23.

Forgas, J. P. (Ed.). (2000). Feeling and thinking: The role of affect in social cognition. Paris: Cambridge University Press. Cited by 407.

Goffman, E. (1978). Response Cries. Language, 54(4), 787-815. Cited by 141. 

Grimm, M., Kroschel, K., Mower, E., & Narayanan, S. (2007). Primitives-based evaluation and estimation of emotions in speech. Speech Communication, 49(10-11), 787–800. Cited by 236.

Hymes, D. (1972). Models of the interaction of language and social life. In J. Gumperz & D. Hymes (Eds.), Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication. New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston. Cited by 3,790.

Izard, C. E. (2009). Emotion theory and research: Highlights, unanswered questions, and emerging issues. Annual Review of Psychology, 60(1), 1-25. Cited by 26.

Kandali, A. B., Routray, A., & Basu, T. K. (2009). Vocal emotion recognition in five native languages of Assam using new wavelet features. International Journal of Speech Technology, 12(1), 1–13. Cited by 24.

Kiesling, Scott. 2009. Style as Stance: Stance as the Explanation for Patterns of Sociolinguistic Variation. In Alexandra Jaffe (ed) Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pp. 171-194. Cited by 153.

Kleinginna, P. R., & Kleinginna, A. M. (1981). A categorized list of emotion definitions, with suggestions for a consensual definition. Motivation and emotion, 5(4), 345–379. Cited by 445. 

Laukka, P., & Juslin, P. N. (2007). Similar patterns of age-related differences in emotion recognition from speech and music. Motivation and Emotion, 31(3), 182–191. Cited by 51.

Laukka, P., Neiberg, D., Forsell, M., Karlsson, I., & Elenius, K. (2011). Expression of affect in spontaneous speech: Acoustic correlates and automatic detection of irritation and resignation. Computer Speech & Language, 25(1), 84 - 104. Cited by 50.

Latour, B. Various topics--truth, rationality, constructivism, sociology, Tarde, quantification, Serres. 

Liscombe, J., Hirschberg, J., & Venditti, J. J. (2005). Detecting Certainness in Spoken Tutorial Dialogues. PROCEEDINGS OF INTERSPEECH. Retrieved from http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.59.8728. Cited by 91.

Lutz, C., & White, G. M. (1986). The anthropology of emotions. Annual Review of Anthropology, 15(1), 405–436. Cited by 495. 

Maynard, S. (2002). Linguistic emotivity: Centrality of place, the topic-comment dynamic, and an ideology of pathos in Japanese discourse. John Benjamins Publishing Company. Cited by 91.

Myers Scotton, C. (1983). The negotiation of identities in conversation: A theory of markedness and code choice. International journal of the sociology of language, 44, 115–136. Cited by 157. 

Ochs, E., & Schieffelin, B. (1989). Language has a heart. Text-Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse, 9(1), 7–26. Cited by 192. 

Ortony, A., Clore, G., Collins, A. (1988). The cognitive structure of emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cited by 3,236. 

Pennebaker, J., Mehl, M., & Niederhoffer, K. (2003). Psychological aspects of natural language use: Our words, our selves. Annual review of psychology, 54(1), 547–577. Cited by 298. 

Pickering, M. and Garrod, S. 2004. Toward a mechanistic psychology of dialogue. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 27, 2. pp 169-190. Cited by 532. 

Planalp, S. 1999. Communicating Emotion: Social, Moral, and Cultural Processes. Cited by 148. Cited by 154. 

Potts, C. 2007. The expressive dimension. Theoretical Linguistics, 33(2), 165-198. Cited by 441.

Rabow, J. (1983). Psychoanalysis and sociology. Annual Review of Sociology, 9(1), 555–578. Cited by 9. 

Russell, J. A., Bachorowski, J., & Fernández-Dols, J. (2003). Facial and vocal expressions of emotion. Annual Review of Psychology, 54(1), 329-349. doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.54.101601.145102. Cited by 190. 

Scheff, T. J. (1983). Toward integration in the social psychology of emotions. Annual Review of Sociology, 9(1), 333–354. Cited by 36. 

Searle, J. (1983). Intentionality: An essay in the philosophy of mind (Vol. 9). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Cited by 1,854. 

Shami, M., & Verhelst, W. (2007). An evaluation of the robustness of existing supervised machine learning approaches to the classification of emotions in speech. Speech Communication, 49(3), 201–212. Cited by 49. 

Skinner, Q. (1979). The idea of a cultural lexicon. Essays in Criticism, 29(3), 205-224. Cited by 13.

Sobol-Shikler, T. (2011). Automatic inference of complex affective states. Computer Speech & Language, 25(1), 45 - 62. Cited by 20.

Solomon, R. C. (1973). Emotions and choice. The Review of Metaphysics, 27(1), 20–41. Cited by 168. 

de Sousa, R. (2010). Emotion. Stanford encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford, CA: The Metaphysics Research Lab, Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University. Cited by 2.

Thoits, P. A. (1989). The sociology of emotions. Annual Review of Sociology, 15(1), 317–342. Cited by 235. 

Watts, R. (2003). Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cited by 349. 

Wetherell, M. (1998). Positioning and interpretative repertoires: Conversation analysis and post-structuralism in dialogue. Discourse & Society, 9(3), 387. Cited by 659. 

Wilce, J. M. (2010). Language and emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cited by 120.

Williams, R. (1983). Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society. Oxford University Press US. Cited by 3,063. 

Zajonc, R. B. (2000). Feeling and thinking: Closing the debate over the independence of affect. (J. P. Forgas, Ed.) Feeling and Thinking: The Role of Affect in Social Cognition, 31-58. Cited by 550.

Zajonc, R. B. (1980). Feeling and thinking: preferences need no inferences. American psychologist, 35(2), 151-175. Cited by 9,308.