Essential understanding of the unconventional syntax of emotional events

The unconventional syntactic and thematic structures of sentences about emotional experiences pose a challenge to linguistic theories that aim to account for the human syntactic parsing mechanism [2;7;11;13]. Potentially incorporating syntactic movement, they are harder to understand for children with specific language impairment or hearing loss [16], or adults with aphasia [5;14] or memory loss [15]. However, research in these areas is minimal and not suitably controlled. Though atypical, understanding these sentences may be crucial for fundamental decision-making: neuropsychological research demonstrating the obligatory activation of a sentence and emotional processing network for decisions required for effective daily functioning despite common assumption that logic and emotion are separable [3;6;9]. So, understanding who we blame for emotional events may underlie many of our logical decisions, via the affective weight we place on the consequences of our options [1;4;10].
An emotion is “…an episode of interrelated, synchronized changes in the states of all or most of the five organismic subsystems in response to the evaluation of an external or internal stimulus event as relevant to major concerns of the organism” [12, p.697]. A sentence is a stable state or dynamic event with a verb at its centre involving one or a number of participants [8;9]. Therefore, a sentence event with an emotion as its verb centre, is an episodic event induced by a stimulus, resulting in a physiological state. The current psycholinguistic study initiates psycholinguistic, neuropsychological, and neurolinguistic inquiry into who we blame for emotional events. I control syntactic, thematic, and event structure/aspect to examine the extent to which physiological states are interpreted as caused by an agent, unintentionally caused, self-caused, or not caused/inchoatively arisen.
Method: 240 object-experiencer (OE) actives and passives were classed as ‘agentive’ if Australian-English undergraduates (AuE:N=63) rated the active subject or passive object as an intentional agent on a Likert scale (no intent–strong intent), and ‘stative’ (or non-agentive but dynamic) otherwise [2;6; since the other nouns were rated low in intent). 248 subject-experiencer (SE) and 254 OE actives and passives were rated by crowdsourced American-English speakers (AE: N=68) via the same method. A different group (AE: N=60) rated whether either noun of the same SE and OE sentences caused the sentence event (did not cause–strongly caused). Finally, a group of 27 AE rated the naturalness of the event detailed in the same SE and OE sentences (very unnatural–very natural; -2–2). AE sentences included proper nouns, AuE, common nouns and an added PP (Table 1).
Results: Both AuE and AE participants identified SE and OE stative (or non-agentive but dynamic) and agentive subtypes via ratings of agency (OE diptest indicating the distribution of ratings is bimodal=0.15, p<0.001; t[125]-test of the difference in mean ratings between subtypes=19.49, p<0.001; SE diptest=0.05, p<0.001; F1,122=82.71, p<0001). However, AE participants rated active subjects and passive objects as causal generally, whether the thematic role was an agent, experiencer, or theme/stimulus, indicating a prevailing causal event structure aspect (OE diptest=0.006, p=1.0; SE diptest=0.02, p=0.74, indicating unimodality, and low sd=0.56). SE sentences were classed as less natural sentence events than OE sentences overall (F[1,13546]=553.82, p<0.001). Additionally, SE sentences whose experiencer was rated as an agent were more natural than those comprising only an experiencer and theme/stimulus (F[1,6692]=68.47, p<0.001; Figure 1).
Conclusion: Experiencer-verbs elicit general causal aspect regardless of agency, indicating we generally ascribe cause to emotional events. SE states are regarded as self-caused, but when they are volitionally initiated they are more natural than when they unintentionally arise. However, since OE sentences are more natural than SE sentences, emotions for which cause is ascribed to another, are more natural sentence events. Our natural tendency to blame another for dynamic emotional incidents, but the experiencer for their own emotional state if prolonged, can affect our decisions via the somatic weight we place on our options. Future study is of decisions on emotions in sentences we experience.