:mode exclamation about amr-guidelines

[nschneid]

http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOflinguisticTerms/WhatIsAnIllocutionaryAct.htm has command, exclamation, question, and statement.

[uhermjakob]

Definition (http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOflinguisticTerms/WhatIsAnExclamation.htm)

Here are two senses for exclamation:

1. An exclamation, broadly defined, is any utterance made with strong emotion.
2. An exclamation, narrowly defined, is a sentence type that is used to express a strong emotional state. It contrasts in syntax or morphology with other sentence types which typically express statements, commands, and questions.

Example (English)

• What a hot summer it was!

Critique (Ulf)

I'm not sure whether either of the two definitions is suitable for AMR.

1. It is hard to consistently annotate sentences as "with strong emotion" or without.
2. The second definition relies on specific syntactic or morphological properties of a sentence, which we actually try to abstract away from in AMR. The following sentences would have to be annotated differently:

• What a hot summer it was! (exclamation according to def. 2)
• It was such a hot summer (unclear according to def. 2)
• It was a very hot summer. (non-exclamation according to def. 2)

[nschneid]

My interpretation is that "What a hot summer it was!" primarily emphasizes the speech act of expressing-an-opinion (the content is secondary), whereas "It was such a hot summer!" primarily emphasizes the content of the opinion.

(One could quibble over questions and imperatives as well: "Was it a hot summer?" is effectively quite similar to "I wonder whether it was a nice summer." or "Please tell me how hot it was this summer." But the utterance is framed slightly differently for these different modes.)

[uhermjakob]

So, would the following two sentences be exclamations (since they express an opinion)?

1. In my opinion, the summer was very hot.
2. I think that the summer was very hot.

Good point about questions and imperatives. Maybe we need to clarify.

1. Could you please pass me the tea? (Syntactically a question, semantically an imperative)
2. Tell me how old you are. (Syntactically an imperative, semantically a question)

[nschneid]

Here's a proposal:

1. :mode interjection should replace exclamation and apply only to utterances/parts of utterances that do not consist of a predication or noun phrase: interjections and discourse particles ("Yay!", "Uh-oh", "Brawwwk!", "Hmm", "Well...", "Yes").
   • We might decide to ignore discourse particles that are part of a larger utterance and do not add any meaning to the utterance.
2. For exclamatory speech act constructions like "What an ADJ NOUN!" or "May you VP!", we decide on an appropriate top-level event frame like opine-01 or curse-01. So "In my opinion, the summer was very hot" and "What a hot summer it was!" would have exactly the same AMR, with opine-01; "I think that the summer was hot" would substitute think-01 but otherwise have the same structure.

[uhermjakob]

Consensus discussion
:mode expressive outch! wow! hmm oh ah d'uh! expresses emotions
Not :mode expressive includes yes (as an answer), no, brawwwk