Emotions in tweets: from instantaneity to preconstruction
Résumé
This study deals with the expression of emotions in a corpus of tweets produced during the 2012 presidential election campaign in France. The aim is to observe how Twitter users formulate their feelings in a technologically constrained yet expressively free communicative environment, in a context of written instantaneity, which allows for the selection of context-adapted linguistic formulae. A comparison of the emotional expressions found in hashtags and the emotional lexicon used in the body of tweets shows some topical discrepancies and, more particularly, different degrees of denotational power. It also reveals a constructivist dimension of emotional expressions in tweets.