Tracing Sentiments: Syntactic and Semantic Features in a Subjectivity Lexicon

In this paper we present a syntactic and semantic analysis of verbal entries in the Czech subjectivity lexicon Czech SubLex 1.0 concerning their semantic and valency properties with respect to the roots and degree of subjectivity and evaluativeness. We demonstrate that evaluative verbs share certain abstract syntactic patterns with valency positions encoding the position of the source and target of evaluative stance. These patterns then roughly correspond to semantic properties of the verbs. For example, verbs propagating sentiments to the Actor position usually describe events of destruction (negative sentiments), or progress (positive sentiments), or events of direct experiencing emotional states, whereas verbs propagating sentiments to the Addressee or Patient position usually describe events of taking and communicating a stance, stopping or eliminating, or praising. The analysis represents the first step towards enhancing the lexical database with syntactic and semantic features in order to suit the lexicon for the task of the detection of targets (and sources) within evaluative stances.