You might look at emotion coding, a type of qualitative analysis that examines how emotions are imbedded into language and interaction.

Chapter 3 of this book offers an in-depth overview of how it is used as well as a sample study that uses emotion coding: http://www.amazon.com/Researching-Interpersonal-Relationships-Qualitative-Analysis/dp/1452203903/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1398751607&sr=1-1&keywords=Manning+Kunkel

And then this book contains more information about the history of emotion coding and how it has been used in other contexts: http://www.amazon.com/Coding-Manual-Qualitative-Researchers/dp/1446247376/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1398751646&sr=1-1&keywords=Saldana+coding

Hope these help!

Thomas, I read recently one article from Maria Cláudia Coelho that discusses something like "the grammar of the emotions". She is an anthropologist and discusses the relationship between emotions and the texts we read, listen to and enunciate, how texts and words index specific emotions? how emotions are differently valued in different cultures / communities?

She wrote a book called "Antropologia das emoções" (Anthropology of emotions) see at:

http://www.editora.fgv.br/?sub=produto&id=345

This book explores the place of emotions as the object of study of the social sciences, seeking to reflect on how some feelings are represented as having a universal essence.

The western common sense often associated aspects of human experience to instincts, or treats them as restricted to the individual subject, making them inaccessible to anthropological reflection. So finding a way to dialogue with these associations and representations is the challenge facing the proposal that an anthropology of emotions.

Below you have one of her papers:

"Narratives of violence: the micropolitical dimension of emotions" at http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?pid=S0104-93132010000200001&script=sci_arttext

And some of the authors she cites:

LUTZ, Catherine. 1988. Unnatural emotions: everyday sentiments on a Micronesian atoll and their challenge to Western theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

___. 1990. "Engendered emotion: gender, power, and the rethoric of emotional control in american discourse". In: C. Lutz & L. Abu-Lughod (orgs.), Language and the politics of emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 69-91.

___. & ABU-LUGHOD, Lila (orgs.). 1990. Language and the politics of emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

ROSALDO, Michelle. 1984. "Toward an anthropology of self and feeling". In: R. Shweder & R. LeVine (orgs.), Culture theory - essays on mind, self and emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 137-157.

Hope it may help you!

Best wishes!

I forgot pasting the abstract of the paper.

"Narratives of violence: the micropolitical dimension of emotions" at http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?pid=S0104-93132010000200001&script=sci_arttext

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes the emotions described in narratives of victimization among Rio de Janeiro's middle classes. It explores the so-called 'contextualist' trend (Lutz & Abu-Lughod 1990) in the anthropology of emotions as a means to understanding violence, focusing on the micropolitical dimension of emotion discourses on victimization. The data analyzed is derived from eight in-depth interviews with married couples who have been through the experience of having their residences assaulted while both of them were at home. The analysis focuses on the recurrence of two emotions in the interviewees' depictions of their feelings towards their assailants: sympathy and contempt. The emergence of these two emotions, whose relations to hierarchy have already been well documented by social scientists, is interpreted as an attempt to re-establish the hierarchies perceived to have been overturned by the assaults.

Key words: Emotion, Micropolitics of Emotion, Urban Violence, Contempt, Sympathy.

I have some experience with qualitative analysis mostly. Some papers are on my profil, some are in preparation. I will send you abstract of my PHD thesis where I explaned reliability of resuls in qualtaite research as analysis of narrative experiance of traumatized people.

In a comparatively recent strand of Systemic Functional Linguistics called Appraisal Theory, Jim Martin and Peter White have developed a rigorous and detailed linguistic framework for the identification and classification of value expressions in language - including among these emotion terms, i.e. affective values. See:

J.R. Marin and P. White 2005. The Language of

Evaluation: Appraisal in English. Palgrave.

You might want to look at DocuScope, a text analysis program and large-scale dictionary (40 million+ strings of English words and phrases) derived from functional linguistics and rhetorical theory. In contrast to most NLP software, which are designed for semantic (extracting meaning) tasks, DocuScope is designed for pragmatic (sociocultural effects) tasks. Essentially, DocuScope can empirically identify the language features that let a human reader understand genre and purpose in language. This allows for the disambiguation and contrastive description of text collections (e.g. how do trauma victims with a PTSD diagnosis talk in interviews vs. those without diagnoses?), and to extract sociocultural features of language such as opinion, affect, certainty, values, and social relationships.

There's a very robust taxonomy of human representations through language use behind DocuScope, and that along with a dynamic grain size make it very reliable. There is a large body of peer reviewed literature that has used DocuScope to solve a wide range of English-language analytical problems in field such as linguistic forensics, automated genre analysis, consumer sentiment analysis, literary analysis, and writing instruction. You can download it, freely licensed for research, here:

http://www.flintbox.com/public/project/23053/