Rethinking Martin & White'S Affect Taxonomy A Psychologically-Inspired Approach To The Linguistic Expression Of Emotion

Utterance production/interpretation depends unmistakably on emotional contexts. This makes the analysis of emotion in language fascinating and difficult, as it permeates all levels of linguistic description. Appraisal Theory is a powerful instrument intended to capture the subtleties of emotion in discourse. Its status as an open-ended tool, though, reveals a need for more sharply defined categories. Whilst the appreciation subsystem has already been elaborated, affect seems to require further refinement. In this chapter, we do so by using corpus evidence and drawing inspiration mainly from three psychological approaches to emotion: appraisal theories, construction theories and neuroscience. In emphasizing the notion of goal as the foundation of all emotion types, our revised model aims to describe emotional instances in more detail.