Expression of emotions in spoken Swedish – a corpus study

Abstract

How are emotions expressed in spoken interaction? Prosodic emotional expressions and emotional words were searched for in the Gothenburg Spoken Language Corpus. Analyses were also made with respect to different activities, e.g. business negotiation, lecture and discussion. Some emotions are expressed with prosody, e.g. surprise, while other emotions are more often expressed with adjectives, e.g. anger and fear. Different emotional expressions are displayed in different social activities. Analyses were also made of prosodic emotional expressions in relation to carrier phrase, showing that the linguistic meaning of some words cannot be determined without the prosody. Preliminary acoustic analyses were made.