Lexical Means in Communicating Emotion in Suicide Notes – on the Basis of the Polish Corpus of Suicide Notes

Abstract

Lexical Means in Communicating Emotion in Suicide Notes - on the Basis of the Polish Corpus of Suicide NotesPolish Corpus of Suicide Notes (PCSN) is a relatively large set of authentic suicide notes that are linguistically annotated on several levels. In order to identify features characteristic for this genre we compared PCSN with the collected subcorpus of counterfeited suicide notes. In this paper we focus on the lexical means of expressing emotions. Our goal was to analyse ways of expressing emotions in this specific genre. Our initial list of lexical markers was based on Markowski’s list of the lexis common for different genres. The list was next expanded with the help of the plWordNet 2.0 — a lexico-semantic network. The expansion was based on the manually selected noun and verb hypernymy branches according to their correspondence to the elements of the initial list. For words from the extended list, a quantitative analysis was performed for both authentic and fake suicide notes. We have also analysed the use of the lexical markers of emotions, feelings and emotional states, as well as emotion operators, and ways of expressing personal evaluation, affection and hate.