Kornacki, Paweł (2001). Concepts of anger in Chinese. In Jean Harkins, & Anna Wierzbicka (Eds.), Emotions in crosslinguistic perspective (pp. 259-292). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9783110880168.255
This paper focuses on five Mandarin Chinese words – 怒 nu, 生气 shēngqì, 恼(火) nao(huo), 憤 fen, 討厭 taoyan – as well as their figurative associations and elaborations, all of which are pertinent to the conceptualization of the “emotions” often rendered with, or comparable to, the English words angry or anger. Ever since Darwin’s classic treatment of emotions, “anger”, “something like anger”, or “a family of anger concepts/expressions” have been recurrently proposed by a number of Western psychologists as one of the “fundamental”, “universal”, “primitive” or “basic” human “emotions”, but this approach has also been criticized. My aim here will be to examine some of the insights that the analysis of the Chinese lexical data might contribute to this debate.
Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
