Elizabeth Zeitoun, Stacy F. Teng and Joy J. Wu, eds. New Advances
in Formosan Linguistics, 533-554 Asia-Pacific Linguistics, 2015
Copyright held by the authors, released under Creative Commons
Attribution Licence (CC BY 4.0) 533
22 A corpus-based approach to the classification of Yami
emotion*
VICTORIA RAU, YI-HSIN WU AND MENG-CHIEN YANG
1 Introduction The point of departure for an investigation of
emotion in a language is its lexicon
(Saucier & Goldberg 1996). Although emotion concepts, such as
happiness, anger, sadness and fear, are intuitively clear and can
be found in various languages, we cannot assume all languages have
the same set of emotions.1 Church et al. (1998) found that the
“hypercognised”2 (Levy 1984) emotions in Filipino3 are anger,
anxiety/fear, happiness, contentment, sadness, and arousal, whereas
the relatively “hypocognised” emotion domains include feeling
tired, guilty, surprised, contemptuous, and aspiring. They also
recommended that the terms in all three subcategories of the
affective conditions class (i.e., pure affective,
affective-behavioral, and affective-cognitive states) in Clore et
al.’s (1987) taxonomy of emotion terms be viewed as referring to
emotions. Although Church
* This study is partially supported by two NSC grants: “A
typological study of Austronesian
languages in Taiwan and their revitalisation”
(NSC100-2420-H-194-011-MY3), 1 November 2011–31 October 2014, and
“Yami ontology: Yami lexical semantics and sociogrammar” (NSC
100-2410-H-194-104), 1 August 2011–31 July 2012.Various parts of
our research have been presented at the 2012 CLDC (Rau, Wu, Yang
& Hu 2012), the 2012 International Conference on Landscape,
Seascape, and the Spatial Imagination (Rau, Wu & Yang 2012),
and the International Conference on Asian Language Processing
(Yang, Rau & Wu 2012). We would like to thank the three
anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and the rigorous
work of the editors of this volume, which has significantly
improved the technical writing of this paper. All remaining errors
are ours.
1 Emotion can be used as either an uncountable or countable noun,
depending on whether the collective concept of emotion is intended
(singular) or individual references of emotion are intended
(plural).
2 Hypercognised and hypocognised emotions refer to the dichotomy
between most important/maximally lexicalised and least
important/minimally lexicalised emotion terms.
3 The word ‘Filipino’ is used by Church et al. (1998). Filipino is
the official name of the national language of the Philippines,
primarily based on Tagalog (http://www.ethnologue
.com/country/PH/languages). Although Tagalog is more frequent in
common parlance, Filipino or Pilipino underlines its role as the
national language. The name Pilipino is also used in the textbook
title Pilipino through Self-Instruction (Wolff et al. 1991) to
emphasise its role as a widely used second language for inter-group
communication.
534 Victoria Rau, Yi-Hsin Wu and Meng-Chien Yang
et al. used a quantitative experimental method to validate Clore et
al.’s emotion model, they relied on a translation of emotion terms
from English rather than searching directly in Filipino. The
translation approach is based on the researchers’ assumptions of
universals in emotion. Although this has its place to provide
“etic” data, one cannot be certain that the equivalents can be
found in translation, not to mention that there is always something
lost in translation. Thus to yield an “emic”4 perspective of
emotion from a language, it is imperative to extract emotion terms
directly from the language, but the problem is how to determine
what constitutes an emotion term in a language.
Cognitive linguists have proposed to construe emotion based on a
grammatical model for Formosan languages, such as Tsou (Huang
2002). Following Talmy’s (2000) suggestion that emotion events are
inherently causal, Hsieh (2011) examined emotional causality in
Kavalan, Paiwan, and Saisiyat. Their theoretical approach has
provided a framework for the present study to explore Yami emotion.
As Yami is the only Philippine language in Taiwan, it is also
important to compare the results of Yami emotions with the results
of Filipino obtained by Church et al. (1998).
How is emotion defined? Wierzbicka (1992) suggests that emotion
concepts can be defined in terms of universal primitives, such as
‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘do’, ‘happen’, ‘know’, and ‘want’, and prototypical
scripts formulated in terms of ‘thoughts’, ‘wants’, and ‘feelings’.
In other words, an emotion event involves someone’s cognition,
affection, or feelings about something that happened to someone or
the fact that someone did something. The thoughts/wants/feelings
can be evaluated as positive or negative. To discover what meets
the definition of emotion from an emic perspective, this study aims
at a grammatical model encoded by the prefix ika- ‘the reason/cause
for a certain feeling’ to conceptualise Yami emotion concepts,
complemented by an ontological approach to compare Yami emotions
with Filipino. As recent interdisciplinary investigations on Yami
fish names (Hu & Rau 2013) and Yami fish ontology (Tai et al.
2008; Rau et al. 2009) have brought us a better understanding of
how metaphors are used in describing fish names and place names, we
intend to adopt a similar interdisciplinary approach to
investigating the classification and ontology of Yami emotion with
the goal of building a complete ontology of the targeted language
and culture.
Our aim is to explore the following three questions: 1. What are
the hypercognised and hypocognised emotions in Yami? 2. Are there
more positive or negative emotion terms in Yami? 3. Do Yami
emotions share the same distinct domains as Filipino emotions? The
organisation of this paper is as follows. After the brief
introduction above, an
introduction to Yami morphology, with a focus on ka- and ika-, is
presented. After that, the results of classification of Yami
emotion are presented, followed by a comparison with Filipino
emotion based on the results of a cluster analysis of Yami emotion.
This paper ends with an evaluation of the application of this
approach to the study of emotion.
4 The terms ‘emic’ and ‘etic’ are used in anthropology to contrast
an insider’s view from an
outsider’s view. They are derived from the linguistic distinction
between ‘phonemic’ and ‘phonetic’. Different sounds which are
‘phonetically’ different may be perceived by native speakers of a
language as either the same or different ‘phonemically’ depending
on the phonological system of the language.
A corpus-based approach to the classification of Yami emotion
535
2 Yami morphology: ika- To understand why the prefix ika- was
chosen as the point of departure for the
investigation of emotion, a brief discussion of Yami morphology is
in order. Yami verbs are classified either as dynamic or stative.
Transitive verbs can be marked by one of the four focus markers:
agent focus (AF) m-, patient focus (PF) -en, locative focus (LF)
-an, and instrument focus5 (IF) i-. Stative verbs, which are mostly
intransitive (i.e., agent focus) (see Table 1), are marked with the
ma- prefix. Note that among the three types of ma-, only the second
type is stative.
Table 1: Yami ma- verbs
ma-cimoy ‘rain’ (1) ma- agent focus ma-ngay ‘go’
(2) ma- agent focus stative verb
ma-saray ma-tava
‘happy’ ‘fat’
ma-cita ‘can see, visible’ (3) ma- patient focus potentive verb
ma-hap ‘can get’
Dynamic transitive verbs (see Table 2), on the other hand, are
marked by the p- prefix.
Here are some contrasting examples of verb forms with the m- and p-
prefixes.
Table 2: Yami dynamic verbs
Intransitive Transitive mi-palit (AF mi-the root is palit ‘change’)
‘exchange’
pi-palit-en (pi-root-PF.en) ‘exchange’
panazang-an (paN-root-LF.an) ‘place where one bought’
maka-vonas (AF maka- the root is vonas ‘remove’) ‘can remove’
paka-vonas-en (paka-root-PF.en) ‘must remove’
maci-vazay (AF maci- the root is vazay ‘work’) ‘engage in
work’
paci-vazay-an (paci-root-LF.an) ‘engage in work with someone’
The stative ka- as described by Zeitoun & Huang (2000) only
appears when the transitive forms are affixed with the instrument
focus prefix i- to indicate the O argument is in IF (instrument or
reason of the action), as illustrated in Table 3. Note that the
Yami prefix ka- is polysemous.6 It can form nouns (e.g., ka-tangked
‘nearby’, ka-paganam ‘dance’), verbs with a separate inflectional
paradigm from the regular focus system (e.g., ka-doa ‘two in
total’, ka-tangara ‘looked up just now’, ka-lavi ‘why cry
(blaming)’, ka-teneng ‘then understand’, exclamatory sentences
(e.g., ka-zakat ‘Go to hell!’, ka-lowlaw ‘so 5 Instrument Focus
covers instrument, beneficiary, and reference. 6 A preliminary
discussion of the functions of the ka- prefix can be found in Rau
& Dong
(2006:132–134). For a more current description of ka-, consult Rau
& Dong (2010, forthcoming).
536 Victoria Rau, Yi-Hsin Wu and Meng-Chien Yang
bloody good!’), or stative verb stems to derive verbs of instrument
focus (e.g., i-ka-rahet ‘consider something bad because …’). The
stative ka- is invisible in intransitive verbs, e.g., marahet
‘bad’, but when a transitive verb prefixed with i- is formed from a
stative root, the ka- prefix marks its stative root, e.g., ikarahet
‘consider something bad because ...’.
Table 3: Yami stative verbs
Intransitive Transitive mazakat ‘killed, dead’ i-ka-zakat ‘killed
because…’ marahet ‘bad’ i-ka-rahet ‘consider something bad
because…’ mam’ing ‘smile’ i-ka-m’ing7 ‘amused because…’.
The emotion-related ika-8 served as a promising point of departure
for searching Yami feeling and emotion based on a bottom-up
approach because it helped us find the majority of Yami emotion
roots. The stative roots (defined as roots that can co-occur with
the ka- prefix) identified as emotion led us to find other derived
verbs. For example, ikangsah ‘feel bored because of such and such
(IF)’ can lead to other derived forms, such as mangsah ‘feel bored
(AF)’ or angsahen ‘feel impatient about someone (PF)’ with the same
root angsah ‘bored’. Take ika’oya ‘feel angry because of such and
such (IF)’ as another example. We can find several other derived
verbs with the same root ’oya ‘angry’: m’oya ‘angry with someone
(AF)’, mi’oya’oya ‘very upset (AF)’, ’oyan ‘reason to be angry
(LF)’, and i’oya ‘get upset with someone (IF)’. As illustrated
above, this bottom-up approach, rooted in the form of the language,
provides a reliable basis to search for the iconic relationship of
isomorphism, i.e., same form, same function.
3 Methods This study adopted a corpus-based approach to find Yami
emotion terms from the ika-
construction and compare the classification of Yami emotion terms
with that of Filipino based on a cluster analysis. The methods are
described in the following four steps.
7 As the orthography of the laryngeal features of /h/ and glottal
stop in Yami remain to be
worked out, currently there are various ways of spelling i-ka-m’ing
and mam’ing, such as ikamiying, ikamihing, mamiying, and mamihing.
For an updated version of Yami phonology and orthography, see Rau
& Dong (forthcoming).
8 The other homophonous, monomorphemic ika- encoding ordinal
number, such as ika-dwa ‘the second’ is not related to emotion and
was excluded from our discussion.
A corpus-based approach to the classification of Yami emotion
537
Step 1: Search for tokens with ika- from the Yami language
documentation website To find potential Yami emotion terms, we
began our study by extracting all 1763
tokens of ika- from our Yami corpus, consisting of sixty-three
texts and the New Testament data from the Yami-language
documentation website.9 The extraction of all the ika- tokens
helped us identify the “construction” meaning (Goldberg 1995:4) of
the grammatical model ika- as ‘the reason/cause for a certain
feeling’. Although ika- is composed of the instrument focus i- and
the prefix ka- in stative verbs, the frequent pairing of the form
ika- with the meaning of ‘the reason/cause for a certain feeling’
has created a new “construction” which cannot be predicted from the
composition of i- and ka- in Yami. Under this cause frame (Dirven
1997), we noticed that ika- can be prefixed with a wide range of
word classes, from pronouns (e.g., ikaiya ‘he is the cause/reason’)
to negation markers (e.g., ikabeken, ikabo ‘reason for being not’)
and stative verbs (e.g., ikamo ‘reason to feel embarrassed’).
Overall, ika- is most frequently prefixed to roots of stative verbs
(e.g., masaray ‘happy’, ma’oya ‘angry’) and bare-root attributive
modifiers (e.g., aro ‘many’, apia ‘good’) to form the most
prototypical cause construction (e.g., ikasaray ‘reason to be
happy’, ika’oya ‘reason to be indignant’, ikaro ‘reason to be
abundant’, and ikapia ‘reason to be good’). However, the wide range
of words co-occurring with the ika- construction still made it
difficult to classify emotion according to Clore et al.’s (1987)
taxonomy. Thus we decided to set aside the ika- tokens temporarily
and search the emotion lexicon by analyzing twenty narrative texts
(Rau & Dong 2006) with clear story lines, as the narrative
context made the task of identifying and coding emotion words much
easier.
Step 2: Search for Chinese translations of emotion expressions The
search for emotion terms based on reading the twenty Yami texts
with Chinese
translations (Rau & Dong 2006) helped us identify 258 potential
emotion expressions, not all of which included ika-. We coded the
258 terms into nine categories. The first six categories fit Clore
et al.’s (1987) framework, but the other three categories include
interjections, curses, and metaphors/metonyms. The coding was
jointly decided by the first two authors. Clore et al. (1987) made
a distinction between internal and external conditions. As we did
not find any token that would fit nicely in the category of
“external” conditions, defined as (1) “subjective” evaluations of
character or stable characteristics (e.g., attractive, trustworthy)
and (2) “objective” conditions, such as things done to a person
(e.g., abandoned, insulted), “external” conditions were excluded
from the study.
The remaining internal conditions were further divided between
mental and non-mental states, as shown in Figure 1.
9 The three Yami websites are Yami language documentation
(http://yamiproject.cs.pu.edu
.tw/yami), Yami e-learning
(http://yamiproject.cs.pu.edu.tw/elearn), and Yami online
dictionary (http://yamibow.cs.pu.edu.tw).
538 Victoria Rau, Yi-Hsin Wu and Meng-Chien Yang
Internal conditions
Pure affective ikarilaw ‘sympathize’ ikaniahey ‘fear’ ikákey
‘like’
Pure cognitive ikakdeng ‘important’ ikanehed ‘true, certain’
ikacilo ‘noisy’
Physical ikabsoy ‘satiated’ ikasaki ‘drunk’ ikakaha ‘sleepy’
Affective-behavior ikam’ing ‘reason for laughing’ ikasnek ‘ashamed’
ikaciwciw ‘scare away’
Cognitive-behavior ikalma ‘lazy’ ikapili ‘picky’ ikaoyat
‘diligent’
Affective-cognitive ikagom ‘overbearing’ ikeylamnay ‘relaxed’
ikahanang ‘calm’
Figure 1: Classification of Yami emotion based on Church et al.
(1998)
The internal non-mental states refer to physical and bodily states
(e.g., sleepy, seasick). According to Clore et al. (1987), internal
mental states consist of affective conditions and cognitive
conditions. Under the category of affective conditions, we further
separated pure affective states (e.g., afraid, angry, happy) from
affective-behavioral states and affective-cognitive states,
depending on whether the affective emotion is followed by an action
(e.g., scare away, fight) or a cognitive consequence of the emotion
(e.g., impatient, sorrowful). The category of cognitive conditions
was similarly further divided into pure cognitive states and
cognitive-behavioral states, with the former referring to the
internal mental states in which cognition is dominant (e.g.,
smelly, stuffy) and the latter being followed by an action (e.g.,
picky, discreet). The other categories of emotion identified from
the twenty texts included interjections/curses (e.g., ouch, damn)
and metaphors/metonyms (e.g., the body is as healthy as light
feathers or someone being as despised as goats). We can see in
Table 4 that the emotion expressions from the twenty texts are
divided into nine categories. Note that the first six categories
contain the ika- prefix, while the last three do not.
A corpus-based approach to the classification of Yami emotion
539
Table 4: Coding categories for Yami emotion
Category Yami English10 1. Physical and bodily states ikakaha
‘sleepy because…’ 2. Pure affective states ikaniahey ‘afraid
because…’ 3. Affective-behavioral states ikavozoaw ‘scare away
because…’ 4. Affective-cognitive states ikaotok ‘impatient
because…’ 5. Pure cognitive states ikangot ‘smelly because…’ 6.
Cognitive-behavioral states ikapili ‘picky because…’ 7.
Interjections ananay ‘ouch’ 8. Curses mo kavazat ‘Damn!’ 9.
Metaphors/metonyms11 nimananat so velek ‘terrified (in the
stomach)’
Step 3: Identification of the final set of Yami emotion terms As
steps 1 and 2 led us to ascertain that the ika- prefix is really
the key area to search
for emotion terms in Yami, we began our final search to find all
the Yami emotion terms in 166 texts (including the twenty texts
mentioned above and 146 other narratives from the three Yami
websites). The final search yielded 12612 Yami emotion terms with
the ika- prefix to serve as the database for categorisation and
analysis in the present study. After the linguistic classification
of the emotion terms was completed, a diagram was drawn using the
Protégé program to represent the Yami emotion ontology.
Step 4: A cluster-analysis of Yami emotions for comparison with
Filipino To explore the possibility of comparing our results with
the previous study on Filipino,
a hierarchical cluster analysis was conducted to produce distinct
domains of Yami emotion.
Following Church et al.’s (1998:78) procedure, a between-clusters
linkage algorithm was calculated to produce comparable dendrograms
for comparison with Filipino emotions. The cross-relationship
between the emotion terms was calculated to build the hierarchical
structure, using the knowledge extracted from our proposed
ontological computation procedure. In contrast to Church et al.’s
questionnaire methods for data collection, our study used a
bottom-up corpus approach to create and grow the ontologies of the
emotion concepts manually. These factors were used to calculate
judgment values for evaluating whether an ika- emotion term could
be put into a specific English emotion 10 As the English
translations of the ika- ‘the reason/cause for a certain feeling’
examples are all
‘feel such and such because…’, we will not repeat the same frame
but only translate the emotion terms in the rest of the
paper.
11 Several body parts have been identified as related to emotion in
metaphors. Due to the scope of this paper, we only list some
examples here with the keywords bolded and will leave a systematic
study on Yami “embodiment” in cognitive linguistics (Lakoff &
Johnson 1999) for future investigation.
(1) ji anisomalap o pahad na. . ‘His soul has indeed flown
away.’
(2) malaw no velek a kalawan. ‘worry to the stomach, i.e., very
worried’
(3) do keyngeyngen na no oo. ‘sick to the head, i.e., have a
headache’ 12 The 258 potential emotion expressions in step 2
contained both ika- words and three other
categories (exclamations, curses, and metaphors). After the 132
expressions without ika- were excluded, this yielded the final 126
terms. As our focus is on classification of different types of
emotion, it is not our concern to report the tokens of each
individual type.
540 Victoria Rau, Yi-Hsin Wu and Meng-Chien Yang
cluster. The clusters in each domain are represented by the key
words and the frequency numbers of Yami ika- words with similar
semantics (near synonyms) shown in parentheses after the ika- word.
The relative distance from each ika- emotion term with the English
translation was calculated using these factors. Finally,
dendrograms were drawn to visualise the clustering results.13
4 Results Based on the analysis of the 126 Yami emotion terms with
the ika- prefix, the
following section first presents the quantitative results of the
most and least important emotion terms in Yami, followed by the
distribution of positive and negative emotion terms, and
ontological representation of semantic categories of Yami emotion.
The second part of the results demonstrates the similarities and
differences between Yami and Filipino.
4.1 Most important and least important emotions in Yami
What is considered the most or least important emotion in Yami is
based on an interpretation of the frequency distribution of the 126
types. Overall, the pure cognitive category (e.g., good, bad,
intelligent, difficult) constitutes the majority of Yami emotion
terms, while affective-cognitive (e.g., lonely) and
cognitive-behavioral categories (e.g., lazy) are the least
frequent. The discovery of the most and the least important emotion
domains in Yami generally matches Church et al.’s (1988) findings
in Filipino data, except that there are no external conditions in
Yami. As shown in Figure 1, Yami emotion based on the 126 terms
with the ika- prefix constitutes three internal conditions,
affective, cognitive, and physical, with the three affective
conditions and the two cognitive conditions “hypercognised”. This
finding supports Church et al.’s recommendation that the terms in
all three subcategories of the affection conditions class in Clore
et al.’s (1987) taxonomy of emotion terms be viewed as referring to
emotions.
As shown in Table 5 and Figure 2, almost half of the emotion terms
are cognitive (44% pure cognitive, e.g., ikacilo ‘noisy’) or
cognitive related (5% cognitive-behavior, e.g., ikalma ‘lazy’), one
third are affective (13% pure affective, e.g., ikarilaw
‘sympathise’; 13% affective-behavioral, e.g., ikami'ing ‘amused’;
and 6% affective-cognitive, e.g., ikagom ‘overbearing’), and less
than one fifth are physical (19% pure physical, e.g., ikabsoy
‘satiated’). Interestingly, if we had not investigated the ika-
construction, we would not have discovered the saliency of the
cognitive categories in Yami emotion.
13 The procedure reduplicated the illustrative dendrograms in
Church et al.’s study for
comparison. The detailed steps of our ontological simulation for
processing the ika- emotion terms supporting Church et al.’s study
is described in Yang et al. (2012).
A corpus-based approach to the classification of Yami emotion
541
Table 5: Distribution of 126 Yami emotion terms (ika- verbs)
Internal conditions
Pure affective
Affective- behavioral
Affective- cognitive
Pure cognitive
Cognitive- behavioral
Pure physical
N=126 17 16 7 56 6 24 100% 13% 13% 6% 44% 5% 19%
pure physical 19%
pure affective 13%
pure cognitive 44%
Figure 2: Classification of Yami Emotion
4.2 Positive and negative Yami emotion
As ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are part of the universal primitives in
Wierzbicka’s (1992) definition of emotion, we assume that emotion
can be coded as a continuum of positive and negative feelings.
Based on the Chinese translations of these emotion terms, we
assigned all the Yami emotions to five levels: positive, relatively
positive, neutral, relatively negative, and negative (see
appendix). Relatively positive and relatively negative evaluations
are determined in relation to prototypes of the two ends. For
example, ikasaray ‘happy’ is taken as prototypically positive while
ika’oya ‘angry’ prototypically negative. Relatively negative and
relatively positive evaluations describe the positive and negative
emotions with lesser degrees in comparison with the two extremes.
For example, ikanig ‘embarrassed, ashamed’ is classified as
relatively negative in relation to the negative end of ‘angry’.
Similarly, ikabsoy ‘satiated’ is classified as relatively positive
in relation to the positive end of ‘happy’.
Some emotion terms may not be “valenced” or evaluated as positive
or negative. For example, ‘surprise’ and ‘amazement’ do not imply
anything good or bad (Wierzbicka
Emotion in Yami
542 Victoria Rau, Yi-Hsin Wu and Meng-Chien Yang
1992:550); therefore, it is necessary to have a neutral category
when it comes to evaluation of emotion, such as ikakaha
‘sleepy’.
The results indicate that Yami has more negative emotions, as shown
in Figure 3. The distribution of Yami emotion is negative 47% (23%
negative, e.g., ika’oya ‘angry’; 24% relatively negative, e.g.,
ikanig ‘embarrassed, ashamed’), neutral 30% (e.g., ikakaha
‘sleepy’), and positive 23% (12% positive, e.g., ikasaray ‘happy’;
11% relatively positive, e.g., ikabsoy ‘satiated’).
This assignment of postive and negative emotion based on
Chinese–English translation remains tentative, and requires further
corroboration with native Yami speakers. In particular, the neutral
category and the fine-grained classifications of the relatively
positive and relatively negative evaluations of Yami emotions may
require a future field study to elicit the ‘emic’ judgments from
the Yami speech community to validate our classification. However,
the generalisation that Yami has more prototypically negative (23%)
than positive type of emotion probably still holds, given the low
percentage of positive emotion (12%).
Positive and Negative Tendency of Yami Emotions
Relatively Negative
23%
Figure 3: Distribution of positive and negative emotion terms in
Yami
4.3 Semantic categories of Yami emotion
The same set of emotion data was further categorised based on near
synomyms. Table 6 lists all the semantic categories of Yami
emotion, divided into Clore et al.’s three categories: (i)
affective conditions, (ii) cognitive conditions, and (iii) physical
and bodily states.
A corpus-based approach to the classification of Yami emotion
543
Table 6: Semantic categories of Yami emotion
Clore et al.’s categories Semantic categories of Yami emotion
Affective conditions Anger, fear, happiness, longingness, love,
nervousness,
sorrow, sympathy, worry, evaluation of size, curse, forgetfulness,
jealousy, noise/calmness, shame, stinginess, danger,
overbearingness, relaxation
Cognitive conditions Age, evaluation of size, boredness, certainty,
cleverness, cold/heat, curiosity, danger/safety, darkness,
difficulty, relaxation, external states of things, distance,
fortune, goodness/badness, greatness, importance, independence,
weight, noise/calmness, quantity, correctness, smoothness, states
of human body, taboo, taste/smell, watchmacallit,
diligence/laziness
Physical and bodily states Disagreement, nitpicking, scheme
The same table can be further represented by the diagram drawn
using the Protégé program to represent the Yami emotion ontology,
as shown in Figure 4. The diagram also helps us visualise the
overrepresentation of cognitive conditions in encoding Yami
emotion. In addition, several semantic categories show
cross-sectional representations, the most important of which is
‘fear’, occurring not only in pure affective and
affective-cognitive conditions, but also in physical and bodily
states.
544 Victoria Rau, Yi-Hsin Wu and Meng-Chien Yang
Figure 4: Ontology describing categories of near synonyms
A corpus-based approach to the classification of Yami emotion
545
4.4 Comparison of Yami emotions with Filipino emotions
Our hierarchical cluster analysis of Yami emotion terms yielded
eleven distinctive domains (see Figure 5), i.e., happy, aroused,
contented, emotionless, contemptuous, angry, sad, tired, quiet/shy,
anxious, and aspiring, almost identical to the Filipino emotion
terms, except that the guilty domain is lacking in Yami. However,
this does not mean Yami does not have the guilty domain. The Yami
word for guilty miraraten (mi-raraten) is derived from the stem
raraten ‘guilt, sin’ (< rahet ‘bad’). As the ika- prefix would
derive ikarahet ‘consider something bad because…’, instead of
guilty, this explains why the guilty domain is missing from the
cluster analysis.
How well these domains are clustered can be evaluated by the
weight. Figure 5 depicts the Yami emotion clusters derived from the
ontological calculation. The dendrograms of this figure show the
selected clusters in each domain. The scale shown is a simulation
calculation derived by the weight function of semantic distance
between each cluster in the emotional ontology. This simulation is
used to emulate the judgment process in Church et al.’s study. If
the weight of the lexical word is close to 0.9, this indicates the
word fits well in its semantic domain. On the other hand, if the
weight is close to 0.1, the word does not fit the domain
well.
The domains in Figure 5 form a hierarchy of fitness: happy (0.8),
angry (0.8), anxious (0.7), aroused (0.6), sad (0.6), tired (0.6),
emotionless (0.5), contented (0.5), contemptuous (0.4), quiet/shy
(0.3), and aspiring (0.3). Thus, the cluster analysis provides
further confirmation of our identification of the eight most
important (or hypercognised) emotion categories and the three least
important (or hypocognised) emotion categories in Yami, if we use
0.5 as an arbitrary threshold.
Although cluster analysis is a useful quantitative tool to yield
preliminary results in our analysis, we cannot avoid
cross-sectional reprentations. Some emotion terms, albeit a
negligible minority, were categorised into two different domains.
For example, ikazoay ‘feel proud’ was put in both “emotionless” and
“aspiring” domains. This points out that assignment of lexical
items to different semantic categories by the third author also
awaits future validation by the speech community members.
In summary, our cluster analysis of Yami emotion identified all
eleven emotion domains found by Church et al. (1998), except the
guilty domain. The reason, as explained previously, is that
ika-rahet ‘consider something bad because …’ only encodes the
emotion of anxiety/worry, whereas guilty is encoded by mi-raraten.
The most important emotions in Yami are anxiety/fear, arousal,
contentment, anger, happiness, sadness, and “emotionless” (i.e.,
feeling bored and other cognitive conditions) whereas the least
important emotion domains include feeling tired, quiet/shy,
contemptuous, and aspiring. Our findings also confirm that the
terms in all three subcategories of the affection conditions class
in Clore et al.’s (1987) taxonomy of emotion terms are viewed as
referring to emotions.
546 Victoria Rau, Yi-Hsin Wu and Meng-Chien Yang
A corpus-based approach to the classification of Yami emotion
547
Figure 5: Hierarchical cluster analysis of Yami ika- emotion
terms
548 Victoria Rau, Yi-Hsin Wu and Meng-Chien Yang
4.5 Evaluation of the current methods
Before we conclude, an evaluation of the corpus
linguistics–cum–ontology methods in the study of Yami emotion is in
order. The strength of this interdisciplinary approach to
investigate Yami emotion lies in the identification of a
grammatical model, i.e., Yami prefix ika- ‘the reason/cause for a
certain feeling’, as a keyword for systematic search in the online
corpus. A detailed analysis of Yami narratives in step 2 resulted
in further data on emotion that overlapped with the ika- words to
yield the final 126 emotion terms in our analysis.
The usefulness of the computerised representations of the Yami
ontology as shown in Figures 4 and 5 in computational linguistics
depends solely on the accuracy of the corpus linguistic analysis of
the Yami data. This prompted us to further validate our
classification in future fieldwork. However, a word of caution is
necessary here. Although the assignment of the emotion terms into
different categories was determined by the first two authors solely
on the basis of clear operational definitions, this was probably
the best approach to our study given the circumstances. An attempt
was made for the first author to bring the list of emotion terms
(in the appendix) to Orchid Island for the community members to
either confirm or reject the validity of our classification.
However, this task incited a debate on what emotion is, and no
consensus was reached. Nonetheless, the preliminary results we
found in the study have paved the way for two immediate follow-up
studies: (1) an evaluation of positive and negative Yami emotion by
community members using a five-point Likert scale and (2) a
classification of emotion terms into the eleven domains in the
cluster analysis by community members.
5 Conclusion This study has classified Yami emotion into six
internal conditions. Like Filipino, the
most important emotions in Yami are anxiety/fear, arousal,
contentment, anger, happiness, sadness, and emotionless (e.g.,
feeling bored), whereas the least important emotion domains include
feeling tired, quiet/shy, contemptuous, and aspiring. In general,
Yami emotions basically share the same distinct domains as Filipino
emotions and similarly the language contains more negative emotion
terms than positive ones.
This study, albeit preliminary, has demonstrated how to use an
interdisciplinary approach to study Yami ontology, using emotion as
a semantic domain. Future investigation can apply the same methods
to cover wider semantic domains in preparation for building a
complete ontology of a targeted language and culture.
A corpus-based approach to the classification of Yami emotion
549
Appendix
Classification of the 126 Yami emotion terms
Positive Yami English Category (Church et al. 1988) ikagága ‘happy’
pure ikáglaw ‘love’ pure ikaizay ‘great’ cognitive ikakey ‘like
(something)’ pure ikákza ‘like (someone, something)’ pure
ikamiying, ikami'ing
‘laugh’ affective-behavior
Relatively Positive Yami English Category (Church et al. 1988)
ikabsoy ‘satiated’ physical ikacigzang ‘strong, hard’ physical
ikahanang ‘calm’ affective-cognitive ikakdeng ‘important’ cognitive
ikalamnay ‘relaxed’ cognitive ikamoay ‘plump’ cognitive ikaoyat
‘diligent’ cognitive-behavior ikapzat ‘safe’ cognitive ikaraevaes
‘fitting’ cognitive ikasazovaz ‘relaxing’ affective-behavior
ikasingat ‘important/expensive’ cognitive ikasonong ‘smooth’
cognitive ikawadwad ‘clear, clean’ cognitive ikeylamnay14 ‘relaxed’
affective-cognitive
14 It may be a variant of ikalamnay ‘relaxed’.
550 Victoria Rau, Yi-Hsin Wu and Meng-Chien Yang
Neutral Yami English Category (Church et al. 1988) ika’amang
‘fainted’ physical ikabezbez ‘hurried’ physical ikaganinam ‘sweet’
cognitive ikahamang ‘forget’ affective-behavior ikahangno ‘smells
fragrant’ cognitive ikahep ‘dark’ cognitive ikahithitkahen ‘love to
sleep’ physical ikakaha ‘sleepy’ physical ikakoan, ikaikikoan
‘watchmacallit’ cognitive ikakoat ‘burning heat’ cognitive ikakopad
‘bitter’ cognitive ikaladan ‘older’ cognitive ikalak ‘curious’
cognitive ikalavayo ‘young’ cognitive ikanehed ‘true/certain’
cognitive ikangilin ‘lucky’ cognitive ikangongyod ‘real, certain’
cognitive ikangot ‘smelly, stinky’ cognitive ikangsah ‘bored’
cognitive ikanoyong ‘real’ cognitive ikaotok ‘bored’ cognitive
ikapait ‘salty’ cognitive ikapaw ‘miss (someone, something)’ pure
ikarehmet ‘heavy’ cognitive ikarekmeh ‘cold (weather)’ cognitive
ikasagpaw ‘heavy’ cognitive ikasinasina ‘divergent’
cognitive-behavior ikasngen ‘too close’ cognitive ikasoliket
‘sticky’ cognitive ikateleh ‘deaf’ cognitive ikavaheng ‘black’
cognitive ikavaw ‘cool’ cognitive ikavokay ‘dry (powder)’ cognitive
ikaynaw/ ikeynaw ‘stinky, fishy’ cognitive ikazemek ‘broken’
cognitive ikazeziak ‘all speak loudly’ affective-behavior ikehma
‘soft’ cognitive ikeyngen ‘muscle ache’ physical
A corpus-based approach to the classification of Yami emotion
551
Relatively Negative Yami English Category (Church et al. 1988) ikaa
‘gluttonous’ physical ikaciciaw ‘too talkative’ cognitive ikacilo
‘noisy’ cognitive ikagolang ‘thin’ physical ikagom ‘overbearing’
affective-cognitive ikahango ‘seasick’ physical ikahen ‘very cold’
cognitive ikakaram ‘as small as a mouse’ cognitive ikakcin ‘hungry’
physical ikalanan ‘gluttonous’ physical ikalikey ‘too small’
affective-behavior ikalinlin ‘faint, too weak to stand’ physical
ikalita ‘scheme’ cognitive-behavior ikalotoy ‘bulging stomach’
physical ikamez ‘chilly’ cognitive ikamo ‘embarrassed’
affective-behavior ikanig ‘ashamed, embarrassed’ affective-behavior
ikapereh ‘few’ cognitive ikapili ‘picky’ cognitive-behavior
ikaraway ‘become ugly’ cognitive-behavior ikasaki ‘drunk’ physical
ikasnek ‘ashamed’ affective-behavior ikasngisngit ‘sharp pain’
physical ikaspet ‘dangerous or complicated’ cognitive ikatahaw
‘weak’ physical ikateyci ‘feel disgusted’ physical ikayod ‘tired’
physical ikazazomay ‘sick of eating something’ physical ikaziknan
‘exhausted’ physical ikazonat ‘inflame’ physical
Negative Yami English Category (Church et al. 1988) ikaciblis
‘cursed’ affective-behavior ikaciwciw ‘scared away’
affective-behavior ikakaniaw ‘taboo’ cognitive ikakezes ‘nervous’
pure ikalag ‘taboo’ cognitive ikalas ‘wrong’ cognitive ikálaw
‘worried’ pure ikalma ‘lazy’ cognitive-behavior ikaloit ‘dirty’
cognitive ikamáma ‘worried’ pure
552 Victoria Rau, Yi-Hsin Wu and Meng-Chien Yang
Negative Yami English Category (Church et al. 1988) ikameneng
‘heartbroken’ pure ikamogaw ‘afraid’ pure ikananat ‘scared, as if
the stomach is lifted’ physical ikangazicin ‘disgusted’ physical
ikanginanawa ‘dangerous’ affective-cognitive ikaniahey ‘afraid’
pure ika'ogto ‘frightened’ pure ika'oya ‘angry’ pure ikarahet
‘bad/feel upset’ cognitive ikararaten ‘stingy’ affective-behavior
ikarokaw ‘lonely, sorrowful’ affective-cognitive ikasalit
‘difficult’ cognitive ikasozi ‘angry (violent)’ pure ikatamoad
‘embarrassing’ affective-behavior ikavozoaw ‘scared away’
affective-behavior ikaynanahet ‘jealous’ affective-behavior
ikaywam/ ikeywam ‘afraid’ pure ikeynanahet ‘selfish/jealous’
affective-cognitive ikeyzaw ‘frightened’ affective-cognitive
A corpus-based approach to the classification of Yami emotion
553
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