Emotion in Politics in Times of War: A Corpus Pragmatics Study

Abstract

Emotions remain a fertile field of research. Thanks to newly available technology, investigating people’s preferences, emotions and feelings is relevant for different purposes and perspectives. Consequently, the exploration of emotion has stimulated specialised software development. This paper presents a snapshot of currently available computational tools for analysing emotions. We also explore and compare their contributions and use them complementarily to characterise a corpus. The study presented here combines several emotion analysis tools to examine and characterise a corpus of political debates. Specifically, 34 British House of Commons debates on the war in Ukraine have been examined to identify the lexicon associated with the emotions articulated by parliamentarians in a situation of maximum political conflict, such as war, and to provide a global overview of the most common terms used, to express emotion and feeling. Using corpus pragmatics, a comprehensive overview of the corpus is obtained, as it allows the analysis of considerable amounts of data, studied from a pragmatics perspective, for the characterisation of emotion in terms of meaning and use.