Cause event representations for happiness and surprise

This paper presents a linguistic analysis of emotions by introducing some concrete linguistic rules in identifying the important elements of an emotion, which are the experiencer and the cause. It specifically discusses two primary emotions, happiness and surprise, in Chinese. These rules can be very useful for emotion detection and classification. We also examine the features of a cause event according to its degree of transitivity, namely agentivity, kinesis, and event participation. We find that the emotion classes (happiness vs. surprise) override the emotion verb types (change-of-state verb vs. homogeneous verb) in terms of cause event features. We believe that this study will have some implications for the linguistic account of causal events as well as the theory of emotions in general. We also hope that this work will shed lights in the automatic detection and classification of emotion in language technology.