Analysis of Indirect Uses of Interrogative Sentences Carrying Anger

Interrogative sentences are generally used to perform speech acts of directly asking a question or making a request, but they are also used to convey such speech acts indirectly. In the utterances, such indirect uses of interrogative sentences usually carry speaker’s emotion with a negative attitude, which is close to an expression of anger. The identification of such negative emotion is known as a difficult problem that requires relevant information in syntax, semantics, discourse, pragmatics, and speech signals. In this paper, we argue that the interrogatives used for indirect speech acts could serve as a dominant marker for identifying the emotional attitudes, such as anger, as compared to other emotion-related markers, such as discourse markers, adverbial words, and syntactic markers. To support such an argument, we analyze the dialogues collected from the Korean soap operas, and examine individual or cooperative influences of the emotion-related markers on emotional realization. The user study shows that the interrogatives could be utilized as a promising device for emotion identification.