A corpus-based analysis of qing(情): a contrastive-semantic perspective

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.