Lexical homogeneity and lexical preference in the Dutch vocabulary of emotions

This article looks into lexical homogeneity, i.e. the extent to which concepts are expressed by the same term, and lexical preferences, i.e. which term is preferred to express a concept, in the field of emotions in Dutch by analyzing three case studies, each on a different taxonomic level (that of the semantic field, the concept, and the word). The data consists of 615.000 occurrences of 233 emotion terms spread over 40 concepts gathered from a newspaper corpus of more than 500 million words. As the results show, age, part of speech, morphology, length and the basicness of emotions influence the relative success of the emotion terms.