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Part of
Surprise at the Intersection of Phenomenology and Linguistics
Edited by Natalie Depraz and Agnès Celle
[Consciousness & Emotion Book Series 11] 2019
► pp. 139–170

Chapter 8
Looking at ‘unexpectedness’

A corpus-based cognitive analysis of surprise & wonder

The nouns surprise and wonder have often been included in the subclass of potentially polysemous psych nouns, which can denote a psychological state and have a derived source reading. Our corpus-based analysis leads us to conclude that these nouns tend to refer to sources of surprise, and as such could rather be termed “source nouns” instead. First, we show that a metonymic link can be established between the primary source sense and the derived state sense of the nouns. We argue that this reversed link can be re-analysed as involving a synecdoche. We then look at the discourse functions of these nouns, notably at their role as “shell nouns”, which confirms our analysis of these nouns as characterizing sources of surprise.

Keywords: prototype semantics, shell nouns, corpus, surprise, psych nouns
Article outline
  • 1.Corpus & background
    • 1.1Theoretical framework
    • 1.2Corpus
    • 1.3Coding
      • 1.3.1Four criteria
      • 1.3.2Referential vs. predicative
      • 1.3.3Patterns
  • 2.Overview of results & resulting semantic analysis
    • 2.1Results of coding
      • 2.1.1Source/state
      • 2.1.2Mention of experiencer and source in the immediate context of occurrence
      • 2.1.3Referential/predicative functions
      • 2.1.4Patterns
    • 2.2A new metonymic analysis
  • 3.The discourse functions of surprise & wonder: Characterizing objects of discourse
    • 3.1“Shell nouns” uses
      • 3.1.1Surprise and wonder: peripheral shell nouns?
      • 3.1.2Semantic gaps: Relating shell nouns and shell contents
      • 3.1.3Referring to complex or abstract objects: Reification
    • 3.2Characterization: Foregrounding the speaker’s point of view
      • 3.2.1Compound nouns (“NN”)
      • 3.2.2Predicative structures (“th- be a/no (Adj) N”)
        • a.Characterizing a topical referent (the pattern th- be a/no (Adj) N)
        • b.The extraposition construction (“it be a/no (Adj) N Clause”)
      • 3.2.3Verbless sentences and speaker’s comments
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 November 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ceb.11.08jug
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