Collocations of Basic Color Terms and Emotion Terms in <scp>S</scp> panish Versus <scp>C</scp> hinese

ABSTRACT Emotions are internal states that can be difficult to describe verbally. Worldwide, emotions are frequently conveyed, either metonymically or metaphorically, by color terms, although differences in color‐emotion associations are observed cross‐ linguistically and cross‐culturally. In this paper, we adopted a corpus‐based approach to this issue and searched for collocations in Spanish versus Chinese of 13 color terms (the basic color terms in Spanish) and the 20 basic emotion terms (from the Geneve Emotion Wheel). For Spanish, we extracted 1609 collocations from the CREA corpus; for Chinese, we extracted 107 765 collocations from the CCL corpus. Both individual and global cross‐linguistic differences in color‐emotion collocation patterns were uncovered using Generalized Linear Mixed Model (GLMM) analyses and Pearson correlation analyses (PCA), respectively. Analyses revealed significant differences, more quantitative than qualitative, in the distributional frequencies of color‐emotion collocations between the two languages, with only black and pink exhibiting similar patterns according to PCA. The color‐emotion associations identified by this corpus approach resemble findings by research conducted with human participants and Large Language Models. Overall, cross‐linguistic similarities seem to reflect common bodily experiences and cognitive processes involved in color‐emotion association, whereas dissimilarities appear to be caused by differences in the cultural contexts, linguistic conventions, and social norms.