Discovering the structure and organization of a free Cantonese emotion-label word association graph to understand mental lexicons of emotions

Abstract

Emotions are not necessarily universal across different languages and cultures. Mental lexicons of emotions depend strongly on contextual factors, such as language and culture. The Chinese language has unique linguistic properties that are different from other languages. As a main variant of Chinese, Cantonese has some emotional expressions that are only used by Cantonese speakers. Previous work on Chinese emotional vocabularies focused primarily on Mandarin. However, little is known about Cantonese emotion vocabularies. This is important since both language variants might have distinct emotional expressions, despite sharing the same writing system. To explore the structure and organization ..