A Cross-Linguistic Corpus Analysis of Negative Self-Conscious Emotion Words

The semantic meaning of negative self-conscious emotion words like embarrassment, guilt, and shame are highly dependent on their cultural and linguistic contexts. For example, An English word like shame might not have the same meaning as its French translation honte due to subtle differences in context-of-use patterns. The main goal of this project was therefore to systematically explore and describe the cross-linguistic variation in the lexical packaging of negative self-conscious emotion words. A corpus-based computational approach was chosen to study this topic. The corpus was composed of English, French, Dutch, and Russian Subreddit data. Word2Vec modelling was employed in order to help identify cross-linguistic differences in lexical packaging. A combination of quantitative and qualitative methods converged on noteworthy findings for the constellations of (I) embarrassment, (II) guilt, and (III) shame. (I) English, French, Dutch, and Russian words for embarrassment collectively revealed a theme centred around youthfulness, and a theme centred around discomfort. (II) English, French, and Russian words for guilt revealed emotional internalization of the moralpurity facets of Western judicial and religious institutions. (III) English and French words for shame both simultaneously revealed themes of self-reflection and moral disgust. These exploratory findings were successful in creating a foundation for further inquiry examining the linguistics and psychology of negative self-conscious emotion words