Emotion and Sentiment Polarity in Parliamentary Debate: A Pragmatic Comparative Study

An ever-increasing interest on the expression of emotions can be seen in the proliferation of studies from different perspectives; medical-psychological, sociological, linguistic, or computer based, to name but a few. From a pragmalinguistic standpoint, ethnopragmatics is interested in the cross-cultural study of emotion. The present confrontation in political discussion, aggravated by the pandemic sanitary crisis, invites an exploration of political debate. Traditionally, political discussion has been studied from a discourse analysis viewpoint. New investigations, able to compile abundant amount of data in order to provide different contexts of political language, can complement these views. The present paper shows a comparative study of a set of session diaries of the Valencian and the Scottish Parliaments during 2020. Its aim was to identify the basic emotion words used in the debate sessions, to investigate them from a cross-cultural perspective and to establish whether these emotion words are culturally transferable, in terms of meaning, use and polarity. The methodology used, corpus linguistics, permits quantitative and qualitative analyses of the corpus assembled. Results show that there exist significant differences in the use of terms in the two subcorpora, and that even when the same words are used in the two contexts, they don’t necessarily infer the same emotions and sentiments—nor the same polarity. The comparison also elucidates the usefulness of existing emotion lexicons for this kind of research.