Coding Anger in Fiction

Abstract

The paper examines the fictional representation of anger in English. The emotion is identified by its lexical indication in the reporting clause (said angrily) accompanied by the direct speech which is assumed to verbalize the emotion. The reporting clause and the direct speech are viewed as the components of an anger-coding unit which is examined in terms of their mutual position and the syntactic and speech-act properties of the direct speech component. Analysis and correlation of these variables (and the length of the direct speech) suggest that anger-coding units display recognizable patterns with characteristic structure and illocutionary profile.

Keywords

• anger-coding patterns
• English
• fiction
• direct speech
• syntactic features
• speech act analysis