An analysis of Chinese joy sense’s Rationale

         According to the relation of antonymy or synonymy to organize a group words, and this group of words reference a same and specific characterized concept, all the above can be said that it is the basis rationale in forming a certain concept.

        From ancient times, Chinese contains a group of words of joy concept, they derived from Physical sensations or body movements. They can be divided into four kinds:

        1) A synonym included meaning of Physical sensation, body movements, joy concept is just a extended meaning.

        2) Joy sense concept came from meaning of physical sensation or body movements, but word forms are semantic autonomy. For instance:

 开         颜      [kha:i⁵⁵    je:n²⁵],

Open   face------smile

笑           眯眯      [ ɕiao⁵¹mi:³³mi:³³ ]

Smile   appearance of closing eyes --------smile with closing eyes

         It’s obvious that the words which contain joy concept came from the movement of body, the parts of body do not mean only the face expression, it also means heart, abdomen, legs, hands or derivatives (laughing voices).

        3) Semantic autonomy of the words is already obscure, but the joy concept came from physical sensation or body. Take “悦 [j^we:⁵¹] (to delight, to happy, pleased)” for example, the original meaning of悦[j^we:⁵¹] is “wipe, relief” , from meaning extended, but nowadays the old meaning disappeared by time passed. “悦 [j^we:⁵¹]” changed to be “stagnation can be set free or vented”.

       4) Words contains physical sensation meaning, words contains behavior meaning, and words contains meaning of joy sense are cognates. Essentially, cognate and synonymy are not very different. But cognate exist because the meaning expand exceed the limitation of word forms, they need new word forms to contain the new meanings, at the same time maintain the association effect, so that these kinds of words are still kept in a big family. For example, “舒服 [ʂu:⁵⁵ fu:²⁵] (comfortable)”, it means body feels relaxed, enjoy the pleasure, and then the joy concept formed.

         There is no doubt that, the semantic linguists have divided emotion, feeling and body movements for three non-subordinated meaning categories. Correspondingly, Syntax has also divided verbs as Psychological verbs, feeling verbs, and behavior verbs. Although three kinds of verbs are demarcated, they still have great connections. Joy this kind of real emotion go into the Chinese system have to rely on sensation, behavior.