Expressing and Describing Surprise

This paper re-examines the well-established distinction between expression and description of emotion as regards surprise. First, the authors show that the expression of surprise does not involve the use of surprise lexemes, but rather mirative utterances and specific syntactic constructions (while the description of surprise involves surprise lexemes). Second, the investigation of the corpus data indicates that surprise lexemes – namely the noun surprise and the adjective surprised – differ fro