Assessing Natural Language: Measuring Emotion-Words within a Sentence or Without a Sentence?

Recently, researchers in the quantitative, questionnaire tradition have been increasingly interested in the impact of emotion language and the measurement of this. Some of these researchers measure emotion-words within a meaning-giving sentence, others measure them in isolation. Based on semantic theory, we argue that emotion-words presented in isolation should mean less to a participant than emotion-words combined with other words forming a sentence as in natural language. Reflecting this, we demonstrated in our study that emotion-words are rated with great intensity when an emotion-word is placed within a sentence than when presented in isolation. As a result, we suggest that questionnaire research is better off measuring emotion-words within a meaning-giving sentence.