Emotion and Cause by Sophia Yat Mei Lee

Author:Sophia Yat Mei Lee
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789811061943
Publisher: Springer Singapore

In (21a), the two events ‘to be happy’ and ‘to see’, are co-temporal. Such co-temporality is indeed a prerequisite for construing two events as an integrated single event (Givón 1993II:14). This means what triggers the presence of happiness is the seeing event, thus, the event 看到他們 kan4dao4 ta1men ‘to see them’ is the cause event of happiness. In (21b), on the other hand, the two events are not co-temporal. It is the perception that ‘many people are enthusiastic about politics’ which causes the happiness, rather than the physical seeing event. In such case, the verb 看到 kan4dao4 ‘to see’ in (21a) serves as the verb in the cause event, while the one in (22b) serves as an epistemic verb that marks the cause event. This analysis also applies in (22) where the cause event of (22a) is 聽到這首歌 ting1dao4 zhe4 shou3 ge1 ‘to listen to this song’, whereas the one of (22b) is 吳華獲判無罪 wu2hua2 huo4pan4 wu2zui4 ‘Wuhua was acquitted’ which is headed by the epistemic marker 聽到 ting1dao4 ‘to hear’.

In addition, the two events in both (21b) and (22b) are not physical perception verbs anymore, but rather verbs of mental reflection. According to Givón (1993, II:14), “when one perceives an event, the perception is co-temporal with the perceived event”. On the other hand, ‘when one reflects upon an event, all manner of temporal gapping may exist between reflection and the reflected-upon event’. In light of this, it is possible that there is no seeing or hearing involved in (21b) and (22b), but it reflects the cognitive awareness of the event. In this study, I filter out sentences without epistemic verbs, such as those in (21a) and (22a).

Furthermore, some sentences involve negation which may result in neutral sentences as in (23), or sentences that do not reflect the meaning of the emotion verbs, as in (24):

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