The annotated lexicon of chinese emotion words

Abstract

This study explores language specificity in the organization and distribution of emotion words in Mandarin Chinese. Anecdotal references to the prevalence of use of verbs in some languages (e.g. Russian and Mandarin) for expressing emotion words compared to English has not been supported by empirical evidence from a comprehensive study of the emotion words vocabulary, and, despite a proliferation of cross-linguistic studies of emotion words, a database of a corpus of emotion words across languages is absent. Emotion words in Mandarin Chinese were extracted, sorted into three semantic categories; emotion words, emotion-laden words and emotion-related words, and tagged for frequency of use, valency, intensity and parts of speech. Corpus data analysis method was then employed to study the patterns of the data. Consistent with other reports on Mandarin Chinese in other domains (e.g. acquisition), it was found that verbs occupied the biggest percentage in both emotion words and emotion-related words categories. An analysis of the valence and intensity of emotion words shows cross-linguistic divergence from what other studies have reported. The study also represents a significant attempt at providing a working template for the identification of emotion words in emotion research.