Acorpus-basedanalysisofqing情.PDFVIP

1 A corpus-based analysis of qing （情（情））: a contrastive-semantic perspective （（情情）） Ruihua Zhang; Vincent B.Y.Ooi National University of Singapore I. Introduction While ‘emotion’ is largely characterized as a universal human category, different emotions are constructed in various contexts through the process of socialization (e.g. Santangelo, 2003). In practice, groups from different cultures conceptualize and categorize human emotional experience in different ways. Emotions in Chinese should therefore be examined on their own terms. Since the lexicon is arguably the central repository of language, a corpus-based analysis of the words denoting emotion categories in English and Chinese should reveal their respective distinctiveness. In this paper, we aim to examine the Chinese-specific concept of qing by focusing on certain Chinese qing ( 情) terms and their English near-equivalents. Discussions of emotions in terms of cultural specificity can be reduced in terms of being impressionistic by means of an examination of empirical data: the corpus-based approach allows us to study how emotion terms are used in natural or at least relatively natural contexts more accurately. For reliable information on lexical use, large corpora are needed especially for less frequent words. A corpus must be large enough to provide a substantial number of instances of the examined item from a number of different texts in order to give us a reliable picture of how this item is used. The corpus data of our research are mainly from two monolingual corpora: the Chinese Int