This paper combines two of Linguateca's projects { Esqueleto (on the human body) and Emocionario (on emotions), to investigate which areas of the human body and, therefore, body words or expressions, are mentioned when Portuguese speakers want to describe emotions or opinions. We present a body map as a novel research tool to describe the connections between the two domains.
This paper describes an attempt to cross-fertilize two projects which have used
the same empirical basis (Linguateca's AC/DC cluster) to get at corpus-based
descriptions of respectively the human body and the emotional realm in
Portuguese, but have so far been developed independently. Given the widely
acknowledged close connections between body and emotion, it seems a natural
next step to probe how these projects can illuminate each other. In this paper,
we look at the following aspects:
1. from the point of view of the work on emotions, we want to investigate a)
whether the already identi ed bodily expressions are speci c to particular
emotions/emotion clusters, and b) whether they are either just an expressive
extension of an already identi ed emotion cluster or constitute rather new
cases that have not yet been considered in the emotion framework, as was
often the case in a previous experiment for increasing emotion coverage[
The research was conducted using the Gramateca framework [
In the Esqueleto project we compiled a sizeable lexicon of words and expressions
containing reference to the human body, classifying them further as to whether
the body was taken literally, or used with ten di erent meaning extensions [
Two of the extended meanings connected with the human body were precisely feelings and opinions, as in the case of the following examples: estar de pe atras (lit. to have one foot back, mistrust), dor de cotovelo (lit. elbow pain, envy), car com a pulga atras da orelha (lit. to have a ea on the back of the ear, being suspicious) for feelings (corpo:sentimento) or ver com bons olhos (lit. see with good eyes, to approve), cabeca dura (headstrong) for opinion (corpo:opiniao).
In addition there was a group of cases where in Esqueleto we had assigned both feeling and opinion, such as encher o saco (lit. ll the stomach, bother/be bothered), corac~ao de manteiga (lit. butter heart, to have a soft heart).
Independently we also started the annotation of emotions, see [
It was therefore natural to look at the body expressions already classi ed as emotions to see whether they would bring a more complete picture of emotion in Portuguese.
As might be expected, it was not easy to assign them to particular clusters: one thing is to agree that some emotion is involved in a particular expression, another is to identify which.
Our initial attempts can be described this way: { We could place ca. 70% of the cases marked as emotions in one or several clusters: we have now to either create further clusters to handle the remaining emotions, or remove the emotion label { Only a fourth of those marked as opinion could nd an appropriate emotion: this we believe reinforces the need to separate between the two cases { an opinion can be uttered without emotional involvement { The most common emotions expressed by the body expressions were dissatisfaction (insatisfac~ao) and surprise (surpresa)
We still need to check how complex the task is and how subjective the emotion assignment task is, not least for xed or semi xed expressions, which seem to have a wide range of meanings and interpretations, displaying even regional or variety di erences in Portuguese (for example, both dor de cotovelo and com o coraca~o nas m~aos have slightly di erent meanings in Brazil and in Portugal. Since the rst author will be developing a set of criteria to judge emotionality and emotion group membership in her Phd thesis, we will postpone exact numbers until these criteria can be applied.
Another study about the interrrelationship of both semantic domains can be done by looking at the (more or less) free co-occurrence of words or expressions of the two domains.
Using Gramateca, a dedicated environment for doing grammar-based studies, we counted the cases where both an emotion and a body part were mentioned in the same sentence, and con rmed that these two semantic domains strongly co-occur, especially in the literary genre. In the Literateca corpus (version 3.2, ca 40 million tokens), 49.0% of the sentences with a body word also include an emotion word, while 12.9% of sentences with emotions have a body word in the same sentence. In Table 1 we present the numbers for some speci c emotions:
Emotion group Total With body Relative Most common word gen (generic) 31,733 8,156 0.257 sentir (feel) furia (anger) 31,091 6,914 0.222 violento (violent) surpresa (surprise) 22,759 4,680 0.214 admirar (astonish) vergonha (shame) 29,949 6,224 0.207 vergonha feliz (joy) 88,662 16,908 0.191 sorriso (smile) medo (fear) 46,567 8,810 0.189 medo admirar (admiration) 13,900 2,776 0.164 respeito (respect) grato (gratitude) 8,668 1,382 0.159 agradecer (thank) ingrato (ungratefulness) 2,238 329 0.147 ingrato
Brie y, one can see that one in ve expressions of a generic emotion co-occurs with a body word in the same sentence, but it is also important to note that the emotion classi cation has not yet been revised. So sentir (feel) can be about a physical sensation as well.
The other way around, we counted how often emotions are associated with one body part and created a "body map" with all related emotions, shown in Figure 1. Body parts in the map only include literal instances of body parts, classi ed in larger groups such as Head, Arms, Legs, Body, Internal and Hair. In Table 2 we show the numbers of sentences including a body word classi ed as belonging to that body part, together with the most frequent co-occurring emotion.
From a cursory analysis of 200 random instances, we could identify some recurring cases of co-occurrence: { cases where an emotion is assigned to a part of the body, like in olhos tristes or rosto triste (sad eyes or face) or riram-se-lhe olhos e dentes (both his eyes and teeth laughed) { expressions where body is related to health, and health is a positive quality along moral ones, like in t~ao feliz, ta~o sadio de olhos, (so happy, so healthy in his eyes). Body part size with emotion relative most frequent emotion group Cabeca (head) 82,932 40,221 0.48 feliz Braco (arm) 48,473 21,220 0.44 amor Tronco (body) 39,977 20,308 0.51 amor Interno (internals) 33,222 17,324 0.52 amor Perna (leg) 19,864 8,119 0.41 amor Cabelo (hair) 10,327 4,420 0.43 feliz { expressions where a body part is used metaphorically, either in standardised expressions like in sangue derramado (spilt blood), entregar-lhe em m~ao (give in his hand), or in speci c literary descriptions such as atirava as trancas negras (...) a cara da sociedade (she threw her black tresses to the face of the society) or estas lagrimas de velho mas enxuguem eles com a sua alegria (these old man's tears should they dry with their joy). (These should not have been classi ed as literally body, but not all instances of human body have been revised, which means that the results in this mapping are not precise, containing as well a large amount of free metaphorical cases.) 4
Although this is still preliminary work and we cannot present a rigorous quantitative summing up of the several experiments and explorations, we believe we are in the right path to improve both emotion annotation and evaluate it, this way getting and sharing further insights on the semantics of the Portuguese language.
We also expect that by using a methodology inspired in geographical
information systems (GIS) for visualization of the interaction of body and emotion
we may be able to identify further alleys for investigating the connection
between these two elds, if we agree with White [