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Information-Seeking Questions and Rhetorical Questions in Emotion Expressions

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Chinese Lexical Semantics (CLSW 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11173))

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Abstract

This paper explores the interaction between emotions and two types of questions, namely information-seeking questions and rhetorical questions. Corpus data shows that rhetorical questions (60.3%) are more frequently used in social media than information-seeking questions (39.7%). Of the two types of questions, approximately 94% of rhetorical questions are used to express emotions, while only 23% of information-seeking questions contain emotions. Given that rhetorical questions do play an important role in emotion expressions, we examine the interaction between rhetorical questions and emotions in terms of question type. Various syntactic structures are proposed for the identification of different emotions. We believe that the linguistic account of different types of rhetorical questions in emotion expressions will paint a fuller picture of the nature of emotion.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    is often found in Weibo as a netizen transformation of .

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by a General Research Fund (GRF) project sponsored by the Research Grants Council (Project No. B-Q50Z) and a PolyU Faculty Research Grant (Project No. 1-ZEVK).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon, Hong Kong

    Helena Yan Ping Lau & Sophia Yat Mei Lee

Authors
  1. Helena Yan Ping Lau
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  2. Sophia Yat Mei Lee
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Helena Yan Ping Lau .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Jia-Fei Hong

  2. Peking University, Beijing, China

    Qi Su

  3. National Chung Cheng University, Chiayi, Taiwan

    Jiun-Shiung Wu

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Lau, H.Y.P., Lee, S.Y.M. (2018). Information-Seeking Questions and Rhetorical Questions in Emotion Expressions. In: Hong, JF., Su, Q., Wu, JS. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11173. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04015-4_31

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04015-4_31

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-04014-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-04015-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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