https://orcid.org/0009-0005-9859-009X
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ABSTRACT
Emotions play a crucial role in human lives, often influencing behaviour. Among others, the feeling expressed by the word happy in English has received particular attention. If, on the one hand, the concept seems basic and likely to exist across languages and cultures, on the other hand, cross-linguistic semantics has shown that even close equivalents in genetically related languages, such as the German glücklich or French heureux, do not exactly correspond in meaning. Although the cross-linguistic differences in the conceptualization of “happy-like” feelings have been emphasized, focus on the cross-linguistic commonalities is insufficient. This study focuses on Japanese “happy-like” concepts, namely ureshii, tanoshii and shiawaseda to examine the question: to what extent are the conceptualizations of “happy-like” feelings similar or different across languages? It describes the meanings of candidates for Japanese near-equivalents of happy in a way that is comparable to other languages by combining the findings from Japanese linguistic studies with the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) framework. Though none of them exactly correspond to the English happy in meaning, investigating “happy-like” concepts from a broader perspective reveals the conceptualizations underlying these concepts in different languages. It implies that although “happy-like” concepts in different languages provide different conceptualizations of emotions, cross-linguistic commonalities may lie beneath them.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to Anna Wierzbicka and Zhengdao Ye for their valuable comments and discussions during the development of this study. I also thank the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments to improve the article. The author is responsible for any shortcomings in the article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Data availability statement
This paper is based on the referenced resources available in the public domain.
Notes
1 Ekman (Citation1973) assumes a limited number of universal basic facial expressions of emotions, pinned down by the English terms anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise, or their corresponding adjectives. They are considered as “basic emotions” that “are built-in as a part of human neurophysiology and recognized in all cultures” (Ekman, Citation1973, pp. 219–220).
2 Even within the field of psychology, the position of basic emotion attracts criticism. According to Barrett (Citation2017), there are two different views on emotion: (i) the classical view of emotion, which regards emotions as physical sensations; and (ii) the theory of constructed emotion, which holds that people actively create their emotions based on emotion concepts. Barrett (Citation2017, p. 15) supports the latter, which argues that emotional experience varies across cultures, while rejecting the former because “[d]espite tremendous time and investment, research has not revealed a consistent bodily fingerprint for even a single emotion”.
3 There are studies on the meaning of the concepts considered equivalent to the de-adjectival noun happiness, which also focus on the linguistic and cultural differences in the conceptualization. For instance, the Chinese xìngfú “is relational in nature, being firmly anchored in interpersonal relationships” (Ye Citation2016, p. 65), whereas the Danish lykke is “solidly earth-bound” and is felt when “a person is thankful for the small things in life” (Levisen, Citation2016, p. 53).
6 Da in the term shiawase(da) is enclosed in parentheses because it can be analyzed in two different ways: as a one-word adjective shiawaseda or as a term consisting of the noun shiawase and particle -da. It is treated as an adjective in this study.
7 There are different approaches to the word class na-adjectives, as it is not easy to distinguish them from nouns from a formal perspective (Muraki, Citation1998). This study uses the term adjective to indicate both i-adjectives and na-adjectives, following Nishio’s (Citation1972) analysis that they are almost identical in their semantic characteristics and grammatical behaviour.
8 The meanings of ureshii, tanoshii and shiawaseda remain untranslated to highlight the semantic differences between the Japanese term and its near-equivalent in English.
9 In Japanese, it is necessary to use verbs such as yorokobu “rejoice” to express the emotions of the non-first person. This contrasts with the predominant use of adjectives (past participles) in English, regardless of the type of subject. There are some verbs, such as rejoice, but it sounds “somewhat archaic and elevated”, suggesting that Anglo culture “encourages them (= people) to be glad rather than to rejoice” (Wierzbicka, Citation1994, p. 227).
10 The suffix -souda is “used when the speaker believes in what he is making an inference about” whereas -noda “converts a statement which is asserted as a fact” (Aoki, Citation1986, pp. 230–232).
11 Japanese adjectives are conjugated by tense. The past tense of ureshii is ureshikatta, the past tense of tanoshii is tanoshikatta and the past tense of shiawaseda is shiawasedatta.
12 Nor does Yamada (Citation1982) use the presence or absence of the passive voice as a criterion for distinguishing between “passive” and “active”. Yamada (Citation1982, p. 122) exemplifies the phrase Okurimono-o choudai-suru “to receive a gift” to show the experiencer’s action is “passive” and it does not include any verb in passive voice.
13 The explications in Hasada (Citation2000) did not follow the current semantic template because they were proposed before it was developed.
14 In idiomatic English, the verb feel is often followed by adjectives such as good. However, as the combination “feel good” is not permitted in some languages, a noun something needs to be inserted between them in NSM.
15 The reason why (42) sounds natural relates to not only the personalization but also the expression to narimashita “it became”, which implies that the event is interpreted as something good “happened before”.
16 Some may argue that don’t want can be broken down into simpler concepts as it is based on the negation of want. However, as shown in , don’t want is listed as one of the semantic primes that cannot be further broken down semantically.
17 This semantic feature of shiawaseda is consistent with the claim of both Nishio (Citation1972) that shiawaseda has “objective property”, and Kikuchi (Citation2000) that it does not require any trigger.
18 Because of this historical development, the English happy is regarded as a cultural keyword in modern English that refers to a salient Anglo-American ideal (Wierzbicka, Citation2006).
19 The Danish lykke, near-equivalent of the noun happiness, has the combination “many good things” + “happened before” (Levisen, Citation2016, p. 53), implying that this combination is not impossible.
20 Two Chinese terms for “joy-like” feelings, xi and le, also have the combination “something good” + “is happening now” (Ye, Citation2006). In particular, le is close in meaning to the Japanese word tanoshii, as it has the component “because someone is doing something”. The component combination “something good is happening” is also included in the explication for the English word joy (Wierzbicka, Citation1999). In this regard, “happy-like” may not be the optimal reference point, as the recurrent components in can also be labelled as “joy-like” concepts. However, due to the difficulty of envisaging an appropriate label to bring together the four types of combinations, this study employs the term “happy-like” concepts as a broad category for convenience.
21 It is not clear whether the Japanese “happy-like” concepts are likely to have the component related to the experiencer’s participation, since tanoshii is the only concept in . The Chinese term le has the similar component “because someone is doing something” (Ye, Citation2006).
22 It should be stressed that this is a working hypothesis that requires further research.
23 Goddard (Citation2014, p. 92) suggests five different possibilities of recurrent “aversive” components in “disgust-related” emotion words. The one shown in is only one of the possible components.
24 The explication for the Japanese word haji, the near-equivalent of the English word shame or embarrassment, has a similar component such as “people can know something very bad about me” or “this is bad” (Farese, Citation2016, p. 42).
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Hiromichi Sakaba
Hiromichi Sakaba is a full-time foreign language lecturer at Ritsumeikan University, Japan. He was a visiting researcher at the Australian National University. His research interests involve semantics, cognitive linguistics, relationships between language and culture, and cross-cultural communication. His PhD thesis featured the contrastive analysis of emotion terms used in Japanese and English that express good feelings.