부산대학교 도서관

In this study, we aimed to investigate the similarities and differences in the concepts of the English emotion word, compassion, and its Korean counterpart, tonceng. Using the GRID questions, we observed almost no crosslinguistic significant differences of components in terms of emotional features. This suggests that emotion concepts conveyed by Korean tonceng may not be different from those conveyed by English compassion. However, taking a dimensional approach, we found that the valence domain associated with the two words are different. Korean speakers evaluated positive contexts associated with tonceng less positively than English speakers did with compassion. Moreover, Korean raters were more negative for negative contexts than English raters. A preliminary search from the English corpus(COCA) revealed that compassion co-occurred mostly with positive collocations, indicating that the English word is frequently used in positive contexts. Unfortunately, due to the lack of the Korean corpus data, we could not make a full comparisons of the corpus results between the two languages. A much thorough future study is required to understand the root causes of the valence differences.