Our new article “Contrasting the semantic space of #shame and #guilt in English and Japanese”, co-authored with Emily Öhman, has been sent to the production team and is soon to appear in #Language and #Cognition 🧚♀️
The study combines corpus and NLP methods to analyse how people frame SHAME and GUILT in two web corpora. The English data (ca. 115 m tokens) comes from Reddit, the Japanese data (ca. 1m tokens) from Hatsugen Komachi. We focus on the search items shame and guilt and 恥 haji ‘shame’ and 罪悪感 zaiakukan ‘guilt’. We ask: What are the main similarities and differences between the experiences labelled as shame and guilt in English and haji and zaiakukan in Japanese?
@elmerot@linguistics In our hypothesis, SHAME and GUILT can be illustrated as contiguous and overlapping semantic spaces, where certain expressions would be closer to certain elements than others or shared across elements. These semantic spaces are based on empirical observations of statistically significant lexical patterns.
@elmerot@linguistics Semantic vector space representations revealed that shame is semantically close to disgrace, dishonor and embarrassment, whilst guilt is more closely related to notions of fault, culpability, and (sincere) remorse. Whilst shame is usually portrayed as a public experience, guilt encompasses both private elements, akin to sadness, and public aspects. The corpus-based analysis of our English samples showed that the two emotions can co-occur and both can be imposed on others.
@elmerot@linguistics In the Japanese sample, zaiakukan is semantically related to loss of face, trust and regret, whilst haji is closer to embarrassment and dishonour. Both are triggered by violations of interpersonal norms, but whilst zaiakukan is often associated with sexuality-related matters, haji links more directly with identity or personality traits of the emoter.
Methodologically, the paper illustrates a replicable process where language-specific vector space representations to access semantically similar expressions are built first, and then their meanings in context can be accessed with corpus linguistic tools.
@elmerot@linguistics@corpuslinguistics as it is often the case, it is quite difficult to summarise in a dictionary entry the nuanced meanings we highlight in the paper. In terms of more general applications of the study, in the long term the idea is to provide people who experience these emotions with a language-specific vocabulary that is not based on English alone. This is just a humble beginning
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