Linguistic Representation of the Emotional State of «SURPRISE» in American English

Abstract

The paper discusses major grammatical constructions that are used to describe the emotion of surprise in American English. Linguistic description of this emotion is difficult to formalize as this emotion is short-lived and is usually described in a clustered way. The linguistic material includes data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English. The paper focuses on grammatical constructions that are used by the speaker to describe their emotions rather than on lexemes that nominate emotional states. Corpus analysis shows that the whole range of grammatical constructions in question can be categorized into two groups: constructions with one proposition and constructions with two propositions. The use of constructions with two propositions allows for a more extended description of the emotion and to shift the focus to the reason, time or action. The paper also claims that, although the emotion of surprise is regarded as a neutral emotion, the grammatical construction, by itself, foregrounds a negative discourse prosody of the lexemes that nominate the emotion of surprise.