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Part of
Emotion in Discourse
Edited by J. Lachlan Mackenzie and Laura Alba-Juez
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 302] 2019
► pp. 213–244

Chapter 9
My anger was justified surely?

Epistemic markers across British English and German Emotion Events

| University of Augsburg (Germany)

In this chapter, I explore the role of epistemic markers as sub-units of analysis in Emotion Events, in particular ANGER events, from a cross-linguistic perspective. The corpus study extends the Emotion Event Model and reports on findings based on 248 written narratives experimentally elicited from British English and German university students. Overall, German writers displayed more ANGER events than the British and males used more epistemic markers than females. In the British Emotion Events, more markers of ‘low’ certainty were used in contrast to more markers of ‘high’ certainty in the German ones. The findings underline the importance of epistemic markers for the modeling of emotion discourse.

Keywords: Emotion Event, epistemic markers, intersubjective positioning, contrastive discourse analysis, corpus linguistics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
    • 2.1Un-/certainty
    • 2.2A contrastive perspective – EM in (British) English and German
    • 2.3Emotion Events
      • 2.3.1A cognitive semantic model
      • 2.3.2Epistemic markers in emotion events – an extended model
  • 3.Corpus and methodology
    • 3.1The AWE corpus
    • 3.2Coding and analysis
  • 4.Contrastive findings
    • 4.1Emotion Events and ANGER events across British English and German
    • 4.2EM + [ANGER] – qualitative analysis
    • 4.3EM + [EMOTION]/ [ANGER] – forms and functions
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1EM in British and German Emotion Events Differ
    • 5.2Revisiting models on emotion discourse
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 27 March 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.302.09fro
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