Syntax and Emotion in Theatre Performance Dialogue: A Cognitive-Linguistic Analysis

The way emotion is expressed in Chinese opera is through detailed sentence structures, but grammar has not been studied much in this context. The researcher examines how emotions in Peking and Kunqu operas are influenced by interrogatives, exclamatives, ellipses and modal particles using 200 annotated scripts. The framework uses syntactic parsing (with spaCy), lexicons (NRC and LIWC) that have been adapted for opera, gesture-syntax mapping (from 150 scenes) and conceptual metaphor theory. The analysis shows that how complex the syntax is in a sentence is the most important indicator of emotional strength (β = 0.58, p < 0.001), with modal particles being the second most important (β = 0.34, p< 0.01). Peking Opera often uses questions (28.7%), connected with anger (φ = 0.72), but Kunqu mostly leaves out certain words (32.1%) which is connected to sadness (φ = 0.65). It is found that in 68.7% of anger scenes, the interrogative is accompanied by finger-pointing. In comparing with Shakespeare, we find that Peking uses exclamative-surprise much more often, with a residual of 4.81. Conceptual metaphors (for example, “ANGER IS VERTICALITY”) join the way we talk with how our body experiences the world. It offers a way to scale up the project, advancing digital heritage, cultural linguistics and emotion-aware NLP, so that Chinese opera becomes a key focus of research connecting language, culture and emotion.