Surprise is treated as an affect in Aristotelian philosophy as well as in Cartesian philosophy. In experimental psychology, surprise is considered to be an emotion. In phenomenology, it is only addressed indirectly in phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas), with the important exception of Ricœur and Maldiney; it is reduced to a break in cognition by cognitivists (Dennett). Only recently was it broached in linguistics, with a focus on lexico-syntactic categories. As for the expression of surprise, it has been studied in connection with evidentiality in languages that encode surprise morphosyntactically. However, how surprise is encoded in languages that lack an evidential morphosyntactic system has been largely unexplored.

This book provides new insights into the dynamics of surprise based on a heuristic hypothesis tested against the investigation of time, language and emotion. It is intended to arouse the interest of a multidisciplinary audience keen on crossing the disciplinary borders of phenomenology, cognitive sciences, and pragmatics.

The theoretical approaches adopted in this collection of articles rely on experiments and corpus data. They advance knowledge by building on robust empirical results coming from psychology, microphenomenology, linguistics and physiology.

Editors : Natalie Depraz (Université de Rouen Normandie) and Agnès Celle (Université de Paris Diderot).

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction
Natalie Depraz and Agnès Celle

Part I. The temporality of surprise

• Chapter 1. Neurophenomenology of surprise
  Michel Bitbol
• Chapter 2. Shock, twofold dynamics, cascade: Three signatures of surprise. The micro-time of the surprised body
  Natalie Depraz
• Chapter 3. The representation of surprise in English and the retroactive construction of possible paths
  Graham Ranger

Part II. Verbal interaction and action

• Chapter 4. Encoding surprise in English novels: An enunciative approach
  Catherine Filippi-Deswelle
• Chapter 5. How implicit is surprise?: Confronting a phenomenological description with a radical pragmatist approach
  Audrey Gerlain
• Chapter 6. Surprise in native, bilingual and non-native spontaneous and stimulated recall speech
  Pascale Goutéraux

Part III. Emotional experience, expression and description

• Chapter 7. Interrogatives in surprise contexts in English
  Agnès Celle, Anne Jugnet, Laure Lansari and Tyler Peterson
• Chapter 8. Looking at ‘unexpectedness’: A corpus-based cognitive analysis of surprise & wonder
  Anne Jugnet and Emilie Lhôte
• Chapter 9. Is surprise necessarily disappointing?
  Claudia Serban

Index

| John Benjamins Publishing Company