YE Zhengdao (School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics, Australian National University), «On Chinese ‘Happiness’: A Semantic Perspective»
Mardi 16 janvier 2018

Résumé
Over the last two decades, ‘happiness studies’ have become one of the fastest-growing research  fields, attracting scholars from diverse disciplines including psychology, philosophy, anthropology, and economics.
In this talk, I illustrate and argue for the fundamental role of language and metalanguage in this fast-growing, global field of ‘happiness studies’, and the contributions linguists can make to it, by looking at the meanings of xìngfú and kuàilè, which are central to Chinese discourse on ‘happiness’ and are generally taken as translational equivalents of English as ‘happy’/ ‘happiness’. I discuss the semantic differences between the two terms, and contrast them with their English counterpart(s). I also look into the meaning of the new loanword happy which is widely used in social media in mainland China. Based on linguistic evidence and corpus data, and employing Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), a cross-translatable universal metalanguage developed at the Australian National University, to represent meaning, I show how kuàilè and xìngfú differ, denoting different concerns, even though they have something in common when compared with English happy or happiness.
More broadly, I make three points. First, I examine the speakability of ‘Are you happy?’, a question which always appears in happiness surveys originating in English. Second, in so far as ‘happiness studies’ rely on self-report, a linguistic perspective is indispensable in order for researchers to appreciate the meanings of words and expressions commonly used within a speech community (e.g. Wierzbicka 2004, Goddard and Ye, 2016). Third, in the Chinese context, a semantic perspective helps solve the well-known ‘China Puzzle’—the declining self-reporting rates of happiness in the growing Chinese economy (e.g. Brockmann et all 2008).

Bio
Zhengdao Ye is a lecturer in Linguistics and Translation Studies at the Australian National University in Canberra. She received her undergraduate degree in Chinese Linguistics and Literature from the East China Normal University, and her Master’s and PhD degrees in Linguistics from the ANU. Her research interests encompass semantics, pragmatics, language and cognition, translation studies, ethnopsychology, and Chinese linguistics. She is the editor of The Semantics of Nouns (Oxford University Press, 2017), and the co-editor, with Cliff Goddard, of ‘Happiness’ and ‘Pain’ across Languages and Cultures (John Benjamins, 2016).