Emotion at the end of life: Semantic annotation and key domains in a pilot study audiovisual corpus

Abstract

This article focuses on emotion talk in English and the semantic annotation of emotions in a pilot study corpus about the end of life. It describes the process of compiling and annotating a corpus containing the transcript of the verbal component of audiovisual material regarding end-of-life care. The paper also aims to present a lexico-semantic analysis of emotion talk based on the combined use of two corpus processing tools: Wmatrix and Sketch Engine. The findings indicate that the limitations of semantic annotation can be overcome by concordance and collocational analysis. They also reveal that the lexis of emotion is commonly present at the end of life and show the main keywords and key concepts, the predominant semantic categories of emotion and the most frequent emotion words in the corpus. The results suggest that the most frequent emotions in the corpus are SADNESS, FEAR, LIKING, LOVE, HAPPINESS/RELIEF, WORRY, CALMNESS, ANGER, HOPE and CONFIDENCE.