Tag: (E) năohuo 恼火

(1995) Chinese (Mandarin) – Emotions / Ethnopsychology and personhood


Kornacki, Paweł (1995). Heart & face: Semantics of Chinese emotion concepts. PhD thesis, Australian National University.

Open access

Abstract:

This thesis uses NSM to explore the conceptual organization of a subset of the emotion vocabulary of Modern Standard Chinese. Chapter One (Introduction) provides background information on the analytic perspective adopted in the thesis, the sources of data, and a preliminary discussion of some of the issues in the early Chinese ethnotheory of “emotion”. Chapter Two explicates the key concept ofxin ‘heart/mind’, which is the cognitive, moral, and emotional ‘centre’ of a person. Chapter Three discusses two related notions, 面子 miànzi and liăn, usually glossed in English by means of the word face; both notions speak to the culturally perceived relevance to the self of other people’s judgements. Chapter Four develops this theme further, dealing with the ‘social feelings’ of Chinese, i.e. reactions to the things people say and think about us. Chapter Five focuses on the semantic field of Chinese ‘anger’-like expressions. Chapter Six analyses the lexical data pertinent to the conceptualization of different kinds of subjectively ‘bad’ feelings, whereas Chapter Seven discusses the emotional reactions to various types of good situations and events.

Wherever possible, the thesis seeks to probe into the culturally based aspects of the conceptual structure of emotion words by drawing on a variety of anthropological, psychological and sociological studies of the Chinese society. On the methodological level, the thesis attempts to demonstrate that the bias inherent in conducting the cultural analysis with complex, language-specific notions (e.g., ‘anger’, ‘shame’, ‘happiness’) can be subverted through a recourse to universally shared simple meanings.


Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners

(2001) Chinese – Emotions


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