Epistemic marker, event type and factivity in emotion expressions

Epistemic markers are shown to be an effective linguistic device to introduce cause events of emotions. Linguistically, epistemicity is highly related to factivity. Yet the possible interaction between emotion-causing event types and factivity has not been explored before. This paper reports a corpus-based study on factivity related issues, focusing on the construction "subject + emotion word + epistemic marker + cause event". The interaction between the epistemic marker and event type in sentences with HAPPINESS emotion, and the factivity of negative epistemic marker are analyzed to present a clear picture of the relationship between epistemic marker and emotion. Our study shows that MOVEMENT and LIFE are the two most frequent event types which are introduced by epistemic markers. Moreover, negative epistemic markers do not have any effect of the factivity of the proposition in complement clause and the polarity of emotions. The emotion of the whole sentence depends on the reversal of the event and the negative epistemic marker.