“Happiness” and “Pain” across Languages and Cultures [1 ed.] 9789027266958, 9789027242723

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nd a d r dda e (eds.) o G Cl i f g d a o Y Zhen

B E N J A M I N S C U R R E N T TO P I C S

s a c ro ain” nd “P ss” a Cultures pine s and “Hap uage L ang

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84

“Happiness” and “Pain” across Languages and Cultures

Benjamins Current Topics issn 1874-0081 Special issues of established journals tend to circulate within the orbit of the subscribers of those journals. For the Benjamins Current Topics series a number of special issues of various journals have been selected containing salient topics of research with the aim of finding new audiences for topically interesting material, bringing such material to a wider readership in book format. For an overview of all books published in this series, please see http://benjamins.com/catalog/bct

Volume 84 “Happiness” and “Pain” across Languages and Cultures Edited by Cliff Goddard and Zhengdao Ye These materials were previously published in International Journal of Language and Culture 1:2 (2014).

“Happiness” and “Pain” across Languages and Cultures Edited by

Cliff Goddard Griffith University

Zhengdao Ye Australian National University

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia

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TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

doi 10.1075/bct.84 Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from Library of Congress: lccn 2016013271 (print) / 2016024450 (e-book) isbn 978 90 272 4272 3 (Hb) isbn 978 90 272 6695 8 (e-book)

© 2016 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Company · https://benjamins.com

Table of contents Exploring “happiness” and “pain” across languages and cultures Cliff Goddard and Zhengdao Ye

1

“Pain” and “suffering” in cross-linguistic perspective Anna Wierzbicka

19

The story of “Danish Happiness”: Global discourse and local semantics Carsten Levisen

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The meaning of “happiness” (xìngfú) and “emotional pain” (tòngkŭ) in Chinese Zhengdao Ye Japanese interpretations of “pain” and the use of psychomimes Yuko Asano-Cavanagh Some remarks on “pain” in Latin American Spanish Zuzanna Bułat Silva

65 87 109

The semantics and morphosyntax of tare “hurt/pain” in Koromu (PNG): Verbal and nominal constructions Carol Priestley

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Index

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Exploring “happiness” and “pain” across languages and cultures Cliff Goddard and Zhengdao Ye

Griffith University / Australian National University

This chapter argues that the cross-linguistic study of subjective experience as expressed, described and construed in language cannot be set on a sound footing without the aid of a systematic and non-Anglocentric approach to lexical semantic analysis. This conclusion follows from two facts, one theoretical and one empirical. The first is the crucial role of language in accessing and communicating about feelings. The second is the demonstrated existence of substantial, culture-related differences between the meanings of emotional expressions in the languages of the world. We contend that the NSM approach to semantic and cultural analysis (Wierzbicka 1996; Gladkova 2010; Levisen 2012; Goddard 2011; Goddard and Wierzbicka 2014a; Wong 2014; among other works) provides the necessary conceptual and analytical framework to come to grips with these facts. This is demonstrated in practice by the studies of “happiness-like” and “painlike” expressions across eight languages, undertaken in the present volume. At the same time as probing the precise meanings of these expressions, the authors provide extensive cultural contextualization, showing in some detail how the meanings they are analyzing are truly “cultural meanings”. The project exemplified by the volume can also be read as a linguistically-anchored contribution to cultural psychology (Shweder 2004, 2003), the quest to understand and appreciate the mental life of others in a full spirit of psychological pluralism. Keywords: cross-linguistic semantics, Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), happiness studies, pain research, language and culture.

1. “Happiness” and “pain” This volume simultaneously deals with two hot topics — “happiness” and “pain” — across a number of languages and scholarly disciplines. The premise is that in the fast-growing fields of happiness studies and pain research, a cross-linguistic perspective is largely lacking. As a result, scholars often underestimate the scale of doi 10.1075/bct.84.01god 2016 © John Benjamins Publishing Company

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cultural diversity. We attempt to bring to the attention of scholars in these fields the striking and fascinating diversity in ways of talking about and conceptualizing such human experiences. While in full agreement with many social scientists and economists that self-reports are the bedrock of happiness research, the volume presents a body of evidence highlighting the problem of translation and showing how local concepts of “happiness” and “pain” can be understood without an Anglo bias. The double inverted commas around the words “happiness” and “pain” are intended to signal that these English words cannot be presumed as valid and self-explanatory meta-categories. They are merely labels of convenience in the dominant global language. As a matter of fact, extensive cross-linguistic research has demonstrated that there are no precise lexical semantic universals in the domain of emotion, and that the specific meanings of the emotion words of any language are often heavily “culturally coloured” (Russell 1991; Wierzbicka 1998, 1999; Harkins & Wierzbicka eds. 2001; Goddard 2010). This means that English-specific words like happiness and pain can have no special claim to epistemological priority, and that using them even as rough-and-ready labels runs a risk of introducing a biased discourse that is centred on the Anglo cultural perspective. In so saying, we place ourselves in opposition to the self-confident assertion (by Diener, Lucas & Oshii 2002: 64) that “researchers succeeded in developing scientific methods for studying subjective well-being” and that “the scientific study of subjective well-being is now poised to grow into a major scholarly and applied discipline.” As explained in Section 2 below, we believe that it is impossible to put the scientific study of well-being, or any subjective phenomenon (including “pain”), on a sound footing without a systematic and non-Anglocentric approach to language. Reflecting on the issue of cross-cultural variability in emotional meanings and emotional experience, the late philosopher Robert Solomon (one of the founding members of the International Society for Research on Emotion), remarked: With people from a very different culture, however, the inaccessibility of emotion presents us with a genuine dilemma. How do we interpret their behaviour, their expressions, and their reports without simply assuming (in the absence of evidence) that their feelings are the same as ours? How do we extrapolate from what we see and hear to what they feel, to the emotion itself? How would we recognize or understand differences? Anthropologists, long faced with this problem, have adopted a number of not always satisfactory solutions …. Translation itself presents a deep problem in such matters… What we have to translate, in effect, is not a word but a whole culture, to see how an emotion — and the name for that emotion — fits into the systematic worldview, language, and way of life of the society.  (Solomon 1995: 256)



Exploring “happiness” and “pain” across languages and cultures

Solomon’s remarks imply the need for a framework of inquiry that is capable of capturing subtle nuances of meaning, and at same time capable of “taking on” big cultural themes. We will expand on this shortly, arguing that the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach to meaning and cultural analysis can answer this need. In the meantime, though, a few words are in order about the choice of subject matter for the present set of studies. First, why “happiness”? Simply because, impelled by a confluence of factors, something like “happiness fever” appears to be manifesting itself in global discourse. To quote just two observers, the historian Darrin McMahon (2006: xiv) has written: “[H]appiness is now a global concern, one with roots, however shallow or deep, in many different cultural and religious traditions”; and the philosopher Sissela Bok (2010): “Not since antiquity have there been such passionate debates as those taking place today about contending visions of what makes for human happiness”. Equally as notable as its global reach is the fact that the topos of “happiness” appears in a very wide (and apparently widening) set of academic disciplines, including not only psychology, political philosophy, and cultural anthropology, but lately in economics and even in computer science (cf. e.g., Hudlicka 2003). As for “pain”, it is with us always, and arguably has a stronger claim to being a genuinely global concern than “happiness”. In the Western tradition, understanding and dealing with “pain” has been the province of doctors, nurses, therapists, and ministers of religion, but in modern times medical science has engaged extensively with the study of “pain”. In our view however — and this is supported by the studies in the present collection — the lack of a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective has so far painted a rather deceptive and homogenous picture of these two contrasting “poles” of human experience.1 What is needed is a broader, cross-cultural picture of “happiness” and “pain”. Such a picture, critical of Anglocentrism, has been developed in persuasive detail in various works by Anna Wierzbicka (e.g. 1999, 2006, 2009, 2014), by Goddard and Wierzbicka (2014a: Chapters 5–6), and in the present book by Levisen (this volume), Wierzbicka (this volume), and Ye (this volume). The studies in this volume build on a deep long-term research effort by Anna Wierzbicka and others in the NSM research community. The approach has made several important contributions to the field: (a) advocating for a cross-cultural perspective anchored in a universal metalanguage, (b) continued efforts to arrive at an insider’s view of the emotion concepts of different languages, (c) devising methods for articulating the prototypical cognitive scenarios that, arguably, form an essential part of emotion concepts (Ye 2013). There is a substantial NSM literature on emotion concepts and emotional expressions across many languages, 1.  A noticeable exception is the volume on the multidisciplinary perspectives on “pain” and “joy” edited by Lascaratou et al. (2008). See also Lascaratou (2007).

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going right back to Wierzbicka (1972, 1973). Most notable are Wierzbicka (1999), Harkins and Wierzbicka (eds. 2001), and Enfield and Wierzbicka (ed. 2002), three book-length efforts dedicated to the cross-linguistic and cross-cultural investigation of emotions. Despite these important precedents, the present volume is special in its selective focus on two contrasting emotion domains across a variety of languages and cultures. 2. Why language (and metalanguage) matters Language matters crucially to how we gain access (both as individuals, and as scholars and scientists) to human feelings and thoughts. Philosophers like Robert Solomon are well aware of this fact, but many psychologists, psycholinguists, and even some linguists, are prone to underestimate the epistemological importance of words for understanding other people’s feelings and thoughts, and the extent to which such words can be (to use a mix of metaphorical expressions) culturally anchored, culturally flavoured, and culturally freighted. The epistemological point is that accessing the quality of other people’s subjective experience necessarily depends on self-reports of one kind or another. As psychologists Lisa Feldman Barrett et al. (2007: 377) put it, self-reports are “essential — for revealing the ontological structure of consciousness”. This applies equally to spontaneous expressions and responses to direct inquiries, e.g. questions from a doctor to patient, sociological surveys about one’s state of happiness, and to other “assessment devices” that may be devised by psychologists, such as those which tap into memory or “experience sampling” (Diener, Lucas & Oshii 2002: 65). In the end, these methods all rely on self-report and they are all dependent on words. Hence, the importance of the fact that the emotion words of different languages do not match up perfectly in meaning and the danger of English as a default language in global studies (e.g. Goddard and Wierzbicka 2014a; Wierzbicka 2014). A second reason that language matters in emotion research is that, arguably, “the way people interpret their own emotions depends, to some extent at least, on the lexical grid provided by their native language” (Wierzbicka 1999: 26; cf. Besemeres 2002; Pavlenko 2005, 2006). As we better understand the meanings of emotion terms in other languages, we can better understand native speaker’s perspectives on what they are thinking and feeling. This does not necessarily mean, of course, that when a language does not have a particular emotion term its speakers lack corresponding experiences, but it can be argued that those aspects of experience that are given linguistic labels are those which are regarded by a people of a given culture as particularly relevant, salient and important. As such, folk labels in effect reveal what the leading Russian lexicographer Jurij Apresjan calls “a naïve



Exploring “happiness” and “pain” across languages and cultures

picture of the human being” (Apresjan 2000: 102–4), or, what anthropologists and cognitive linguists call a cultural model or folk theory of a person (Holland & Quinn 1987; D’Andrade 1995; Shore 1996; Sharifian 2011). Furthermore, in the view of NSM researchers, the clear-cut demarcation that is often drawn between folk theories and scientific theory appears less than tenable. For one thing, it is difficult for scientific theories to be fully free from the “naïve picture” inherent in the native language of the researchers. Equally, however, a scientific theory about human emotion without folk knowledge as its theoretical basis ultimately lacks a “human face”; that is, an emotion theory that is entirely dissociated from ordinary language use may run the risk of being divorced from the social reality and cultural context where people’s emotional life actually takes place and which gives rise to the incredible richness of human emotional life (Kövecses 2000; Wierzbicka 1999, 2014). When interpreting the self-reports of people whose native language is not English, if we simply convert their words into their assumed English counterparts, we are in effect “re-coding” and altering their meanings. What is needed, instead, is a way of unravelling the meanings of “happiness-like” and “pain-like” expressions in many languages, and this calls for a way of rendering these meanings into a common code that can be transposed across languages. Hence the need for a vocabulary of culturally “safe” words for speaking about human feelings and thoughts, as explained in the next section. This volume demonstrates the usefulness of such “safe” words, known as the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), and shows how they can be used to compose explanatory texts for word meanings, known as explications. 3. The metalanguage of semantic primes The 65 semantic primes — simple words with equivalents in all or most languages — are listed in Table 1, using English exponents. Comparable tables have been drawn up for about 30 languages from a diversity of language families, geographical locations and cultural types. Though there are only 65 items in the inventory, it represents a fairly rich set of semantic “basics” which span many different semantic areas, as suggested by the division of the table into 12 rough groupings. There is an extensive linguistic literature about how these primes were discovered over the past three decades, about how they manifest themselves in the vocabularies of different languages (sometimes disguised by language-specific polysemy), and about their grammar of combination, which also appears to be substantially the same across all or most languages (e.g. Goddard & Wierzbicka eds. 2002; Peeters

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ed. 2006; Goddard ed. 2008).2 We will not attempt to summarize this literature here, but rather concentrate on giving a thumbnail sketch of those aspects that are most pertinent to the emotional domain. Table 1.  Semantic primes (English exponents), grouped into 12 related categories i~me, you, someone, something~thing, people, body kind, part this, the same, other~else one, two, some, all, much~many, little~few good, bad big, small know, think, want, don’t want, feel, see, hear say, words, true do, happen, move be (somewhere), there is, (is) mine, be (someone/something) live, die when~time, now, before, after, a long time, a short time, for some

substantives relational substantives determiners quantifiers evaluators and descriptors mental predicates speech actions, events, movement location, existence, possession, specification life and death time

time, moment where~place, here, above, below, far, near, side, inside, touch not, maybe, can, because, if, very, more, like~as

space logical concepts

Notes: –  Primes exist as the meanings of lexical units (not at the level of lexemes) –  Exponents of primes may be words, bound morphemes, or phrasemes –  They can be formally complex –  They can have combinatorial variants or “allolexes” (indicated with ~) –  Each prime has well-specified syntactic (combinatorial) properties.

The semantic primes from which emotion and sensation concepts are typically built include: (i) the personal and social primes — someone, i~me, people; (ii) primes from the “mental” group — feel, think, want, don’t want, and know, reflecting the intersubjectivity of emotion concepts; (iii) good, bad and very, to express the quality of the feeling ; (iv) sometimes, in particular for “sensation” concepts, including “pain” — body and parts (of the body); (v) temporal elements, such as for some time, in one moment, to help distinguish between prolonged and momentary feelings; (vi) primes depicting events and actions are usually present in the cognitive scenarios — happen, do; (vii) and logical primes — because, can, not, like — to “glue” the explication together. Rather surprisingly, it turns out that between a third and a half of the full prime inventory is needed to build the emotion concepts of human languages. Among these, it is obvious, presumably, 2.  More resources are available online at the NSM Homepage hosted by Griffith University. Short URL: bit.ly/Lz6QbN.



Exploring “happiness” and “pain” across languages and cultures

that feel and think play a pivotal role, but it’s perhaps worth noting here that the similarity prime like also plays a special role, both supporting cognitive scenarios (‘this someone thinks like this: … ’) and in typicality components (‘like people feel at many times when …’).3 Every semantic prime has specified grammatical frames which allow primes to combine into meaningful combinations. In other words, as well as a universal mini-lexicon, the Natural Semantic Metalanguage has a universal mini-grammar (Goddard & Wierzbicka eds. 2002; Goddard ed. 2008). This grammar has been explored in a fairly systematic way for over 20 years and, though a couple of murky areas remain, it is now well documented and can be regarded as substantially well understood. As well as simple combinatorial possibilities (e.g. ‘this something~thing’, ‘someone else’, ‘one place’, ‘two parts’, ‘many kinds’, etc.), the grammar of semantic primes includes extended valencies and complement options for the mental primes think, know, want and don’t want. Although groups of primes share particular properties and can be regarded as falling into natural classes, virtually every prime has some idiosyncratic combinatorial properties. For this reason, it is not possible here to give a sketch of the full NSM grammar. For illustrative purposes, however, Table 2 displays the valency and complement frames for two semantic primes which all explications in this volume use, think and feel, using English exponents.

3.  It may be useful to provide some summary notes on differences in how the main mental primes relevant to emotions are expressed cross-linguistically (Goddard 2010). In many languages, exponents of feel have polysemic extensions such as ‘taste’, ‘smell’, and ‘hold an opinion’. Sometimes the exponents of feel and hear are related or even identical in form. Distinctive grammatical constructions (“experiencer constructions”) are common with exponents of feel, such as impersonal constructions, dative subject constructions, and the like. It is not uncommon for exponents of think to have polysemic extensions such as ‘intend’, ‘worry’, ‘long for’, and even ‘count’. On a grammatical note, English permits using think in a general “opinion” sense with a that-complement (e.g. ‘I think that she’s at home’), but this is a peculiarity not shared by many other languages and it is not part of the universal grammar of think. Exponents of want often have polysemic extensions such as ‘like’ and ‘love’, or ‘seek’. Many languages employ different grammar for the two types of clausal complement that are possible with want. From a formal point of view, exponents of semantic primes are not always morphologically simple. When they are morphologically complex, it is not uncommon for two or more mental primes to share some morphological material between them, such as a common root or formative. A useful resource for identifying exponents of semantic primes is the schedule of 150 canonical sentences given in Goddard and Wierzbicka (2014b).

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Table 2.  Valency frame arrays for semantic primes think and feel

someone THINKS about someone/something someone THINKS something (good/bad) about someone/something someone THINKS like this: “ … ” someone FEELS something (good/bad) someone FEELS something (good/bad) towards someone else someone FEELS something (good/bad) in part of the body

[topic of cognition frame] [topic + complement frame] [quasi-quotational frame] [minimal frame] [directed feeling]
 [locus of bodily feeling]


In short, the metalanguage of semantic primes, used by all contributors to this volume, provides a common measure or framework (tertium comparationis) that, firstly, makes the analytical contributions across all eight languages and cultures strictly comparable with one another, and, secondly, puts them into a universal frame of reference applicable to other languages and cultures around the world. In this connection, it is useful to call on the perspective of cultural psychology, as articulated by the distinguished American scholar Richard Shweder. He sees cultural psychology as a special project of cultural anthropology based on the conviction that “culture and psyche are interdependent and make each other up” and dedicated to what he calls “psychological pluralism” (2003: 40). In Shweder’s view, a very special effort is needed in order to truly understand and appreciate the mental life of others, largely because of the difficulty of detaching from one’s own native categories and ways of thinking about psychological functioning. What is needed, he writes, is a suitable language for “the comparative study of mental states” (cf. Shweder 2004), and he sees NSM research as offering the most developed and promising proposals for this purpose, in the form of the mental primes think, feel, want, don’t want, and know4 and others, including good and bad, because, and part. He writes: [A]ny theory of psychological pluralism would lack credibility if it denied the existence of any and all universals. Indeed, cultural psychology presupposes many psychological universals, including feelings; wants; goals, and ideas of good and bad, of cause and effect, of part-whole relationships. (Shweder 2003: 40)

The convergence with NSM thinking is remarkable.

4.  Since Shweder (2003, 2004), the semantic prime don’t want has been added to the prime inventory, or, more accurately, it has been re-installed after 15 years off the list. don’t want, or ‘diswant’, was one of the 13 primes originally proposed in Wierzbicka (1972).



Exploring “happiness” and “pain” across languages and cultures

4. Explications and cultural scripts The primary products of NSM semantic analysis are formal representations of meaning known as semantic explications. The concept of an explication is central to NSM work. An explication tries to show what a word or other expression means to a speaker or for a speaker. Consequently it can be viewed equally as a linguistic analysis and also as a conceptual analysis. The studies in the present collection present about 50 explications for words and expressions related to “happiness” and “pain” in eight languages. To get a sense of what explications look like and how they work in relation to expressions for “emotions” and “sensations”, let us briefly consider two examples. It cannot be emphasized too much that these explications are proposed specifically for English words. As the chapters in the volume demonstrate beyond doubt, similar or analogous concepts in other languages can differ markedly. Explication [A] below is for the English word happy, in contexts such as He/ she is happy. Note that the grammatical context (often called a grammatical frame) is important because the English word happy is polysemous. The frame being used here, i.e. human subject with a bare predicative adjective, helps select the intended sense; excluding, for example, the somewhat different meaning of happy found in an expression like I’m happy with my job. Space does not allow a full discussion and justification of the details of the explication (see Wierzbicka 1999: 60–3; Goddard 2011; Goddard & Wierzbicka 2014a: Ch 5), but a few supporting remarks may be helpful. Explication [A] suggests a relatively mild and generic response to a feeling that ‘many good things are happening to me now as I want’ and that one can do as one wants. As argued in Goddard and Wierzbicka (2014a: Ch5), before the eighteenth century, the word happy referred to a more intense, exceptional and short-lived feeling, linked with something like good luck or good fortune (as the comparable term still does in many European languages; cf. German glücklich, French heureux). [A] Semantic explication of English happy (as in He was happy). a. he (= this someone) thought like this for some time at this time: b. “many good things are happening to me now as I want I can do many things now as I want this is good” c. because of this, this someone felt something good at this time d. like people feel at many times when they think like this for some time

Explication [A] follows a semantic template shared with many English emotion words (Wierzbicka 1999; Goddard 2011, 2012). This template has four main parts: (a) attribution of some prototypical thought content to the experiencer, (b) the

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spelling out of this content, sometimes called a prototypical cognitive scenario, (c) the triggering of a feeling (good or bad, as the case may be), (d) which is understood to be typical of the kind of feeling evoked by such thoughts. The main idea behind this structure, i.e. that emotion concepts are understood via prototypical thoughts, was first proposed in Wierzbicka (1972) and was further developed in NSM theory into the notion of a ‘prototypical cognitive scenario’ in the 1990s (cf. especially Wierzbicka 1999). The key role of the cognitive scenario aligns with research findings from psychology that emotions involve script-like mental processes (Fehr & Russell 1984), and with the role of appraisal in emotion (Moors et al. 2014; cf. Ye 2013). As for English pain, it is explicated in [B] (Goddard & Wierzbicka 2014a: Ch 6). The overall structure is rather different, even though the explication is constructed, for the most part, from the same semantic elements as [A]. In terms of its “ingredients”, the chief difference is that the pain explication includes (twice) the expression ‘part of this someone’s body’. In terms of structure, the pain explication is different, first, because it starts with a (bad) feeling (rather than with a thought); and second, because this bad feeling is characterized in terms of a real scenario involving something bad happening to part of someone’s body (rather than a cognitive scenario). Pain is a bad feeling like one can feel in such a situation. Crucially, this situation involves not only something like “damage” happening to part of one’s body, but also a resulting bad feeling ‘in this part of the body’, and a strongly negative mental reaction to this feeling, a reaction that the prototypical experiencer cannot prevent (‘this someone can’t not think like this: “I don’t want this” ’). [B] She felt pain.

a. she felt something bad at that time   like someone can feel when it is like this: b. something bad is happening to a part of this someone’s body c. this someone feels something bad in this part of the body because of this d. this someone can’t not think like this at this time: “I don’t want this”

There are many discussion-worthy aspects of this explication which cannot be pursued here. We will draw attention only to two of them. First, the explication focuses on a rather localized site (‘a part of this someone’s body’), rather than on the body in a global sense. Second, although the explication accords physical pain a privileged status as a reference point, it treats pain as a unitary concept, applicable to both physical and emotional pain. Both these points are amply discussed in several studies in the collection (Wierzbicka, Bułat Silva, Ye, Priestley). In addition to semantic explications, used by all contributors to this volume, a couple of the chapters (by Levisen on Danish, Priestley on Koromu) also use or refer to the concept of cultural scripts. This term refers to the main vehicle used by



Exploring “happiness” and “pain” across languages and cultures

NSM linguists working in pragmatics, or, as NSM researchers prefer to say, ethnopragmatics (Goddard ed. 2006, ed. 2013; Goddard 2015a, 2015b). Although they are written largely in the metalanguage of semantic primes,5 cultural scripts are not paraphrases of word meanings. They are “representations of cultural norms which are widely held in a given society and are reflected in the language” (Wierzbicka 2007: 56). Most cultural scripts are introduced by the framing component: ‘many people think like this: … ’. This shows that they are intended as representations of widely shared social attitudes. Cultural scripts exist at different levels of generality and may relate to different ways of speaking, thinking, acting, and even (as Levisen and Priestley show in their respective studies) to different ways of feeling and responding to feelings. 5. Writing and reading NSM explications The critical thing about a semantic explication is that it is intended to be a paraphrase, more specifically — a reductive paraphrase, i.e. an attempt to say in other, simpler words what a speaker is saying when he or she utters the expression being explicated. NSM is the only system of semantic analysis to employ reductive paraphrase in a strict sense. Many systems seek to describe meaning in decompositional terms, but there is an enormous difference between paraphrasing and describing. Paraphrase attempts to capture what anthropologists term an “insider perspective”, with its sometimes naïve first-person quality, rather than the sophisticated outsider perspective of an expert linguist, logician, social psychologist, etc. Devising an explication is no easy matter. Although there are some heuristics to support the process (Goddard 2011), there is no mechanical procedure or “discovery method” that can be followed. A good explication will, however, satisfy at least three conditions. The first is substitutability in a broad sense: explications have to make intuitive sense to native speakers when substituted into their contexts of use, and to generate the appropriate entailments and implications. The second condition is well-formedness: they have to be framed entirely in semantic primes or molecules, and conform to the syntax of the natural semantic metalanguage. The third, more difficult to evaluate, concerns coherence, “flow”, and logical structure; minimally, an explication has to make sense as a whole, with appropriate chains of anaphora, co-reference, causal links, etc. Often the textual structure of explications turns out to include parallelism and counterpoint. Generally 5.  Some cultural scripts include complex but universal (or near-universal) words, such as social category words like ‘men’, ‘women’ or ‘children’. They may also include culture-specific words designating culturally important concepts or categories (cf. e.g. Ye 2004; Yoon 2004).

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speaking, considerable effort is required to come up with any explication that satisfies or appears to satisfy these conditions. All the explications in the present volume have been through numerous iterations as the analysts explored the pros and cons of different components and different arrangements of components. Keith Allan (p.c.) once rightly observed that NSM explications are “easy to read, hard to write” (cf. Allan 2001: 276–281), but while the point is well taken (because writing explications implies a demanding process of analysis), it is also true that even reading explications is not necessarily all that easy. Despite being composed in ordinary words, they are not ordinary discourse. For one thing, they are much longer than the kind of pithy (but opaque) formulations constructed from complex English-specific words typically found in dictionaries, for example. Some scholars apparently find the simple wordings “childish” and difficult to take seriously (apparently unmoved by the argument that simple wording improves semantic resolution and helps ward off Anglocentrism). It would be easy, and in some cases probably justified, to dismiss this kind of response as reflecting an unscientific attitude, but there is an obvious intertextual dissonance between the simple wording of NSM and high prestige academic English. For many readers, explications are a new genre and the NSM metalanguage is a new register, and as when one encounters any new genre or register, a period of familiarization and stylistic habituation may be necessary before one feels fully comfortable. It is also important to acknowledge that although their individual components are simply phrased, when read as a whole NSM explications are often quite complex and difficult to take in. Actually, there should be nothing surprising about this. Although phrased in simple and intelligible terms, an explication does not in any sense reduce the semantic complexity of the original expression; rather, what it does is to articulate that complexity. It is only natural therefore that a certain amount of time and effort is required to fully absorb an explication, especially if it represents an unfamiliar concept, not found in one’s own language and culture.6 Somewhat offsetting these challenges of interpretation, many NSM explications have textual and compositional features that make them easy to remember and easier to understand. Allan (2001: 279) compares them to “prose poems”, presumably alluding to the lexical sparseness, grammatical parallelism and counterpoint (repetition of similar structures, with differing key words), and perhaps

6.  There is no contradiction in recognizing this and claiming at the same time that complex semantic content is fluently at play in normal cognition and communication, because, firstly, the content is packaged into words, which appear to be cognitively processed as units, and, second, because normal cognition and communication is supported by tremendous routinization and “over-learning”.



Exploring “happiness” and “pain” across languages and cultures

also to the satisfying aesthetic effect that can come from a finely-honed choice of words. None of this is to say that any given NSM explication is perfect. We are certain that no contributor to this volume advances their explications as the “ultimate truth”. Indeed, over the past three decades many published explications have been subsequently revised, by their original authors or others, in the light of broader considerations, additional evidence, improvements in the metalanguage, and so on. Nonetheless, we are prepared to say that NSM explications are always offered as approximations to the truth or as hypotheses about the truth. Even if an explication is faulty, it is better to have a clearly expressed, and hence testable (and revisable) hypothesis, than no hypothesis at all. It is this spirit of truth-seeking that has underpinned and energised the NSM research community over the past decades, and resulted in the publication of literally hundreds of explications from many languages. 6. This volume The studies in this volume present another 50 explications — for words corresponding to “happiness”, “pain” and related concepts. They cover eight languages: four European — English, Danish, German, French, and Spanish (Latin American Spanish), three Asian — Chinese, Japanese, Pali, and one small indigenous language — Koromu, from Papua New Guinea. In order of presentation, the chapters are as follows: – “Pain” and “suffering” in cross-linguistic perspective, by Anna Wierzbicka. – The story of “Danish happiness”: Global discourse and local semantics, by Carsten Levisen. – The meaning of “happiness” (xìngfú) and “emotional pain” (tòngkŭ) in Chinese, by Zhengdao Ye. – Japanese interpretations of “pain” and the use of psychomimes, by Yuko Asano-Cavanagh. – Some remarks on dolor “pain” in Latin American Spanish, by Zuzanna Bułat Silva. – The semantics and morphosyntax of tare “hurt/pain” in Koromu (PNG): Verbal and nominal constructions, by Carol Priestley. Most of the studies confine themselves to contemporary times, though Wierzbicka’s cross-linguistic review of “pain and suffering” delves into the cultural history of the concept of “suffering” and its links with Christian tradition. Likewise, most of the authors concentrate on words and word meanings, though Asano-Cavanagh

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and Priestley, respectively, examine typologically distinctive and interesting lexicogrammatical phenomena; namely, Japanese psychomimes, and experiencer constructions and special NP syntax in Koromu. The studies vary in the extent to which they draw out links with other aspects of the cultures. Ye draws links between the Chinese “happiness” concept (xìngfú) and the relationship orientation of Chinese culture as a whole. Using cultural scripts, Levisen links the Danish concepts of lykke with what may be called the Danish philosophy of life. Priestley links the lifestyle and culture of the Koromu people of Papua New Guinea with different attitudes to “pain”. Bułat Silva touches on the tango in her discussion of Latin American Spanish dolor, and its differences both to French douleur and English pain. And as mentioned, Wierzbicka traces aspects of modern European notions of “suffering” back to their roots in the teachings of the New Testament. Even in those chapters that do not engage explicitly in this kind of argumentation or commentary, however, there is an implicit and constant relevance to culture, if only because in documenting language-specific semantic/conceptual differences one is ipso facto documenting cultural differences. In terms of lexical focus, there is — rather surprisingly — a certain bias across the collection in favour of “pain”-related concepts, but this is more than offset by the compelling critiques of “global happiness studies” offered in the chapters by Levisen and by Ye. 7. Parting remark In his Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, first published in 1785, the Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid commented on the difficulties faced by those who would inquire systematically into the human mind. Recognising the need for what we would now call conceptual semantics, he draws an analogy between this undertaking and mathematics. So, in order to discover the truth in what relates to the operations of the mind, it is not enough that a man be able to give attention to them; he must have the ability to distinguish accurately their minute differences, to resolve and analyse complex operations into their simple ingredients; to unfold the ambiguity of words, which in this science is greater than in any other, and to give them the same accuracy and precision that mathematical terms have. (Reid 1785: 63)

Pursuing the analogy with mathematics, Reid comments that “For indeed, the same precision in the use of words; the same cool attention to the minute differences of things; the same talent for abstracting and analysing which fits a man for the study of mathematics, is no less necessary in this” (Reid 1785: 63–64).



Exploring “happiness” and “pain” across languages and cultures

Reid’s insistence on the importance of “minute differences” is certainly borne out by the studies in the present volume. As Wierzbicka (this volume) shows in relation to English pain vs. French douleur, for example, even a small difference in semantic content can be responsible for a discernably different range of use in the language — not just different collocational patterns and polysemic extensions, but significantly different “discourses”. And as Asano-Cavanagh shows, the Japanese psychomimes are an exquisitely fine-tuned system for indicating subtle differences in the phenomenology of “pain”. From a methodological point of view, we see it as impressive that the Natural Semantic Metalanguage can provide analytical purchase across such diverse areas and at such a fine level of resolution. Indeed, we would go so far as to say that just as numbers and measurement provide quantitative science with the tools needed to discern and specify minute differences in the physical world, so the metalanguage of semantic primes provides the tool or instruments needed to discern and specify minute differences in the realm of concepts, symbols and ideas. In line with the aims of this new journal, we hope that this collection provides a “proof of concept” demonstration that NSM techniques open up new ways of exploring the intricate relationships between language and culture, and new ways of making connections between different disciplines and communities of scholarship at the language and culture interface.

References Allan, K. (2001). Natural language semantics. Oxford: Blackwell. Apresjan, Ju. (2000). Systematic lexicography. [trans. Kevin Windle] Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barrett, L. F., Mesquita, B., Ochsner, K. N., & Gross, J. J. (2007). The experience of emotion. Annual Review of Psychology, 58, 373–403. ​doi:  10.1146/annurev.psych.58.110405.085709 Besemeres, M. (2002). Translating one’s self: Language and selfhood in cross-cultural autobiography. Oxford: Peter Lang. Bok, S. (2010). Exploring happiness: From Aristotle to brain science. New Haven: Yale University. (E-book). D’Andrade, R. (1995). The development of cognitive anthropology. New York: Cambridge University Press. ​doi:  10.1017/CBO9781139166645 Diener, E., Lucas, R. E., & Oishi, S. (2002). Subjective well-being: The science of happiness and life satisfaction. In C. R. Synder & S.J. Lopez (Eds.), Handbook of positive psychology (pp. 63–72). New York: Oxford University Press. Enfield, N. J., & Wierzbicka, A. (Eds.). 2002. The body in the description of emotion: Crosslinguistic studies. Special Issue of Pragmatics & Cognition, 10 (1/2). Fehr, B. & Russell, J. A. (1984). Concept of emotion viewed from a prototype perspective. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 113(3), 464–486.

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Cliff Goddard and Zhengdao Ye Gladkova, A. (2010). Russkaja kul’turnaja semantika: ėmocii, cennosti, žiznennye ustanovki [Russian cultural semantics: Emotions, values, attitudes]. Moscow: Languages of Slavonic Cultures. [in Russian] Goddard, C. (2006). Ethnopragmatics: A new paradigm. In C. Goddard (Ed.), Ethnopragmatics: Understanding discourse in cultural context (pp. 1–30). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.  ​doi:  10.1515/9783110911114.1 Goddard, C. (2010). Universals and variation in the lexicon of mental state concepts. In B. Malt & P. Wolff (Eds.), Words and the mind: How words capture human experience (pp. 72–92). New York: Oxford University Press. Goddard, C. (2011). Semantic analysis: A practical introduction. Revised 2nd Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goddard, C. (2012). Semantic primes, semantic molecules, semantic templates: Key concepts in the NSM approach to lexical typology. Linguistics 50(3), 711–743.  doi: 10.1515/ling-2012-0022

Goddard, C. (with Zhengdao Ye). (2015 a). Ethnopragmatics. In F. Sharifian (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of language and culture. Routledge. Goddard, C. (2015b). Words as carriers of cultural meaning. In J. R. Taylor (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of the word. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goddard, C. (Ed.). (2008). Cross-linguistic semantics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.  doi: 10.1075/slcs.102

Goddard, C. (Ed.). (2013). Semantics and/in social cognition. Special Issue of Australian Journal of Linguistics, 33(1). Goddard, C., & Wierzbicka, A. (Eds.). (2002). Meaning and universal grammar—Theory and empirical findings. Vols I and II. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Goddard, C., & Wierzbicka, A. (2014a). Words and meanings: Lexical semantics across domains, languages and cultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goddard, C., & Wierzbicka, A. (2014b). Semantic fieldwork and lexical universals. Studies in Language, 38(1), 80–127. ​doi:  10.1075/sl.38.1.03god Harkins, J., & Wierzbicka, A. (Eds.). (2001). Emotions in crosslinguistic perspective. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ​doi:  10.1515/9783110880168 Holland, D., & Quinn, N. (Eds.). (1987). Cultural models in language and thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ​doi:  10.1017/CBO9780511607660 Hudlicka, E. (2003). To feel or not to feel: The role of affect in human-computer interaction. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 59, 1–32. Kövecses, Z. (2000). Metaphor and emotion: Language, culture, and body in human feeling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lascaratou, C. (2007). The language of pain: Expression or description? Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ​doi:  10.1075/celcr.9 Lascaratou, C., Despotopoulou, A., & Ifantidou, E. (Eds.). (2008). Reconstructing pain and joy: Linguistic, literary, and cultural perspectives. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars. Levisen, C. (2012). Cultural semantics and social cognition. A case study on the Danish universe of meaning. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. McMahon, D. (2006). Happiness: A history. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. Moors, A., Ellsworth, P. C., Scherer, K. R., & Fridja, N. H. (2014). Appraisal theories of emotion: State of the art and future development. Emotion Review, 5(2), 119–114.  doi: 10.1177/1754073912468165



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Pavlenko, A. (2005). Emotions and multilingualism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ​ doi:  10.1017/CBO9780511584305

Pavlenko, A. (Ed.). (2006). Bilingual minds: Emotional experience, expression, and representation. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Reid, T. 1785. Essays on the intellectual powers of man. Edinburgh: John Bell. [Available on googlebooks] Russell, J. A. (1991). Culture and the categorization of emotion. Psychological Bulletin, 110, 426– 450. ​doi:  10.1037/0033-2909.110.3.426 Sharifian, F. (2011). Cultural conceptualisations and language: Theoretical framework and applications. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ​doi:  10.1075/clscc.1 Shore, B. (1996). Culture in mind: Cognition, culture and the problem of meaning. New York: Oxford University Press. Shweder, R. A. (2003). Why do men barbeque? Recipes for cultural psychology. Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press. Shweder, R. A. (2004). Deconstructing the emotions for the sake of comparative research. In A. S. R. Manstead, N. Frijda & A. Fischer (Eds.), Feelings and emotions: The Amsterdam symposium (pp. 81–97). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  doi: 10.1017/CBO9780511806582.006

Soloman, R. C. (1995). The cross-cultural comparison of emotion. In J. Marks & R. T. Ames (Eds.), Emotions in Asian thought: A dialogue in comparative philosophy (pp. 252–208). Albany: State University of New York. Wierzbicka, A. (1972). Semantic primitives. Frankfurt: Athenäum. Wierzbicka, A. (1973). The semantic structure of words for emotions. In R. Jakobson, C. H. van Schooneveld & D. S. Worth (Eds.), Slavic poetics: Essays in honour of Kiril Taranovsky (pp. 499–505). The Hague: Mouton. Wierzbicka, A. (1998). “Sadness” and “anger” in Russian: The non-universality of the so-called “basic human emotions”. In A. Athanasiadou & E. Tabakowska (Eds.), Speaking of emotions: Conceptualisation and expression (pp. 3–28). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Wierzbicka, A. (1996). Semantics: Primes and universals. New York: Oxford University Press. Wierzbicka, A. (1999). Emotions across languages and cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ​doi:  10.1017/CBO9780511521256 Wierzbicka, A. (2006). English: Meaning and culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Wierzbicka, A. (2007). Russian cultural scripts: The theory of cultural scripts and its applications. Ethos, 30(4), 401–432. ​doi:  10.1525/eth.2002.30.4.401 Wierzbicka, A. (2009). Language and metalanguage: Key issues in emotion research. Emotion Review, 1(1), 3–14. ​doi:  10.1177/1754073908097175 Wierzbicka, A. (2014). Imprisoned in English: The hazards of English as a default language. New York: Oxford University Press. Wong, J. O. (2014). The culture of Singapore English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ​ doi:  10.1017/CBO9781139519519

Ye, Z. (2004). Chinese categorization of interpersonal relationships and the cultural logic of Chinese social interaction: An indigenous perspective. Intercultural Pragmatics, 1(2), 211– 230. ​doi:  10.1515/iprg.2004.1.2.211 Ye, Z. (2013). Comparing the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach to emotion and the GRID paradigm. In J. J. R. Fontaine, K. R. Scherer & C. Soriano (Eds.), Components of emotional meaning (pp. 339–409). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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“Pain” and “suffering” in cross-linguistic perspective Anna Wierzbicka

Australian National University

This chapter builds on findings of the author’s 1999 book Emotions Across Languages and Cultures: Diversity and Universals, which tentatively identified eleven universals pertaining to human emotions. The chapter probes some of those “emotional universals” further, especially in relation to “laughing”, “crying”, and “pain”. At the same time, the author continues her campaign against pseudouniversals, focussing in particular on the anthropological and philosophical discourse of “suffering”. The chapter argues for the Christian origins of the concept of “suffering” lexically embodied in European languages, and contrasts it with the Buddhist concept of “dukkha”, usually rendered in Anglophone discussions of Buddhism with the word suffering. Keywords: pain, suffering, Christianity, Buddhism, laughing, crying, Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM)

Ways of thinking and speaking about “happiness” and “pain” differ across languages and cultures. Both themes — “happiness” and “pain” — are at the forefront of current research and cross-disciplinary debates across a range of disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology, psychology, and others. They are also of central interest to practical areas such as nursing, counselling, and palliative care. But while both “happiness” and “pain” loom large in contemporary English discourse, they are not universal human concepts. The English key words pain and happiness help us to connect with Anglophone discourse on these themes, but not with human ways of thinking world-wide. If we want to locate certain universal human concerns and explore them from the point of view of both our common humanity and the diversity of languages we must at some point reject the conceptual crutches that the English words happiness and pain offer. Initially, these crutches are convenient but in the long run, they are treacherous. If we are to avoid the Anglocentrism inherent in looking at human experience through the prism of such English concepts, we need to acknowledge, first of all, that doi 10.1075/bct.84.02wie 2016 © John Benjamins Publishing Company

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all people feel at times something bad, and at other times, something good. As evidence suggests, all languages have words for ‘good’, ‘bad’ and ‘feel’, and can put them together in sentences like ‘I feel something good’ and ‘I feel something bad’ (Wierzbicka 1999; Goddard 2008; Goddard and Wierzbicka 2014). There is no universal human discourse about “happiness” and “pain”, but there is one about ‘feeling something bad’ and ‘feeling something good’. So this is where we need to start. The topics of ‘feeling something bad’ and ‘feeling something good’ are both salient in human speech, but bad feelings are universally elaborated by being linked, in some way, with the body. More often than not, there is no comparable elaboration in the case of good feelings. This chapter is organized as follows. In the first section, I examine the phenomena of laughing and crying, trying to establish what exactly is universal in their conceptualization across languages. In the section, I discuss the concept of “pain” (as the word is used in English) and the relation between “physical pain” and “mental pain”. The fourth explores the concept of “suffering” and its roots in Christianity, and the differences between the Christian (and post-Christian) concept of “suffering” and the Buddhist concept of “dukkha”. The fifth is a case study of the French concept of “douleur” in relation to the English concept of “pain”. The final section contains some brief concluding remarks. 1. Laughing and crying According to the German philosophical anthropologist Helmut Plessner, the author of a book entitled Laughing and Crying, all people laugh and cry. Plessner goes so far as to say that “a creature without the possibility of laughing and crying is not human” (1970: 7). At least, this is what the English translator of Plessner’s book tells us. In the German original, Plessner uses the words lachen and weinen, and while lachen does mean the same as laugh, weinen does not mean the same as cry, and comes closer to weep. So what exactly is the claim — that all people laugh and cry, or that all people laugh and weinen (roughly, weep or cry).2 The differences in meaning between crying, weinen and weep have to do with the relative audibility of the vocalizations: the verb cry implies that “crying” is normally audible, weinen, that it is often audible, and weep (as the word is used in present-day English), that it is sometimes audible. As recognized by the Oxford English Dictionary, however, in older English weep also implied audible sounds, as weinen does today:



“Pain” and “suffering” in cross-linguistic perspective

weep: To manifest the combination of bodily symptoms (instinctive cries or moans, sobs, and shedding of tears) which is the natural expression of painful (and sometimes of intensely pleasurable) emotion; also, and in mod. use chiefly, to shed tears (more or less silently).

I will return to the exact differences between cry, weinen, and weep shortly. According to Plessner (1970: 7), the phenomena of laughing and crying (or weeping) are so important for understanding human beings that nothing can “release us from the duty of clarifying what laughing and crying [weinen] really mean”. Further, Plessner insists that such clarifications cannot come from scientists who try to “find instances of laughing and crying [weinen] among animals” or who approach the study of these human phenomena from a strictly behavioural point of view. Any external registration of sound stimuli, of gesture and expressive movement [Gebärde], misses the significance of laughing and crying [weinen], just as with speaking, acting, and shaping. Indeed, in the very selection of these particular kinds of behavior, which, however natural and innate in every human creature, distinguish this creature from nature, from animal existence ( …) there already appears an interpretation of man by himself. In this interpretation, man lays claim to a special position which observation, directed merely to the externals of behavior by seemingly objective methods, can neither confirm nor contest.

The English translation (published in 1970) says ‘man’, but the German original says Mensch, that is, ‘a human being’. I totally agree with Plessner that on the question of what laughing and crying really mean, “man himself must be heard” (p. 7) — not the scientists, but ordinary human beings. Only the interpretation that ordinary human beings around the world give to these phenomena, the significance that they confer them, can clarify what these human universals really are. But human beings around the world speak different languages. To see how all these different human groups interpret the phenomena which in English are referred to as laughing and crying we need to look at the data from a sample of different languages. Do they all have words matching laughing and crying in meaning? The answer must be that they don’t. We have already seen that the German weinen doesn’t mean exactly the same as the English cry. Similarly, we know that, as Zhengdao Ye (2006) showed in a careful study, the Chinese word xiào doesn’t mean exactly the same as the English laugh. Nonetheless, cry and weinen, do have a common core, and so do laugh and xiào. As I see it, if we want to clarify what the human universals linked in English with the words laugh and cry really mean — that is, what they mean from a panhuman point of view, we need to, first, look at lexicographic data on the counterparts of laughing and crying in a number of diverse languages from different parts

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of the world, and then, try to formulate their semantic common core in simple words that are cross-translatable into any human languages. I would note that in the days of rapidly dying languages, documenting the presence of words for “laughing” and “crying” in a given language should be an important part of language documentation projects. After all, this is a likely area of human universals. It is also important, however, that when the presence of such verbs is being documented, their meaning is examined from an indigenous, rather than “scientific” (or “scientistic”) perspective. For example, in the Warlpiri Dictionary (Laughren et al. 2006) (which is a priceless resource but, in my view, too scientifically-inclined), the verb ngarlarri-mi, which appears to mean the same as the English verb laugh, is defined as follows: Definition: x (=human) produce rapid periodic sound from vocal tract (lirra), involuntarily, because of something which is amusing (jiliwirri, mururru) to x, or which causes x to be delighted (wardinyi) or to be embarrassed (kurnta)

This technical definition is supplemented with the comment: “English: laugh, giggle, chuckle” and with the note: “This action is usually accompanied by movements of facial muscles and other muscles.” Clearly, neither the definition nor the note reflect the indigenous perspective, because the words used in them come from technical English. Furthermore, the English gloss “laugh, giggle, chuckle” appears to suggest a difference in meaning between ngarlarri-mi and laugh which — judging by the material cited in the Dictionary — appears not to be there. Since this material is rich and illuminating, we can conclude, it seems, that Warlpiri does have a semantic counterpart of laugh, which can be defined in simple words and phrases that are cross-translatable into Warlpiri itself. I will illustrate the use of this verb with some examples from the Warlpiri Dictionary: Ngarlarrimi is like when a man or a woman laughs in fun at a funny child. Ngarlarri is like when we laugh at a child who uses bad language. I will tease the little girl to make her laugh [-ngarlarrinjaku]. … like when a person tricks people in fun and talks and makes people laugh [ngarlarrinjaku]. The woman just laughed at him [-ngarlarrija] out of pleasure.

Let us consider, in turn, one language — Chinese — which clearly does not have an exact semantic equivalent of laugh, in order to see how much shared meaning can be attributed to the English laugh and its closest Chinese counterpart, xiào, usually glossed as ‘laugh/smile’.



“Pain” and “suffering” in cross-linguistic perspective

English makes a lexical distinction between an expression of good feelings that is both visible and audible (laugh) and an expression of good feelings that is only visible (smile). Chinese doesn’t make such a lexical distinction. The verb xiào covers the whole area divided in English between laugh and smile. The only aspect of the “laugh/smile” spectrum which is required for the verb xiào to apply is the visual one. This does not mean, however, this verb does not refer in its meaning to the audible aspect at all. Arguably, it includes both aspects, presenting the visual aspect as necessary, and the audible one, as common. Some evidence for this can be found in sentences like “I heard some people xiào” which are fully acceptable in Chinese (Zhengdao Ye, p.c.). Of course, one can’t say in English “I heard some people smiling”. This suggests that xiào does include a reference to sounds that a frame like ‘I heard …’ can hook onto. When someone “laughs”, other people can both hear it and see it. When someone smiles, other people can see it, but can’t hear it. When someone does xiào, other people can always see it, and often, they can hear it as well. Thus, in the conceptual structure of xiào, the image is associated with the sound, even though in many situations an external observer may hear no sounds. This leads us to the following explications. For convenience, they are divided into three sections. [A] She was laughing (English)

a. she was doing something at that time at the same time, something was happening to some parts of her body, not because she wanted it b. people often do this when they feel something good for a short time often they do it when they think like this: “something is happening here now not like at many other times, people here can feel something good because of this” c. when someone does this, it is like this: some parts of this someone’s mouth are moving for some time other people in the place where this someone is can see it at the same time, these people can hear something, like people in a place can hear something when someone is saying something in this place often, these other people can know because of this how this someone feels

[B] She was xiào (Chinese)

a. she was doing something at that time at the same time, something was happening to some parts of her body, not because she wanted it b. people often do this when they feel something good for a short time often they do it when they think like this: “something very good is happening here now not like at many other times people here can feel something good because of this”

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c. when someone does this, it is like this: some parts of this someone’s mouth are moving for some time other people in the place where this someone is can see it at the same time, often these people can hear something, like people in a place can hear something when someone is saying something in this place often these other people can know because of this how this someone feels

It is easy to see that the two explications are identical, except for the presence of the word often in the explication of xiào (in the middle component of section (c)). One other aspect of the explication of xiào proposed here which may require comment is the reference to some involuntary facial movement in the second component — (‘not because this someone wanted’). According to Plessner, the (perceived) presence of some involuntary bodily events is an essential aspect of both laughing and crying as human phenomena. This is clearly consistent with the testimony of words like laugh and cry in English. It is not obvious, however, that it is also consistent with the meaning of the Chinese word xiào. I would hesitate to posit the component ‘not because this someone wanted’ for the English word smile, even though it is possible that in the case of smiling, too, some facial muscles move ‘not because this someone wants it’, even if it is a “social smile”, rather than a spontaneous expression of good feelings. But xiào may be different in this respect from smile. The very fact that Chinese does not draw a sharp line between the behaviours that English divides sharply into “laughing” and “smiling” suggests that what is called “smiling” in English may be interpreted in Chinese as closer to “laughter” than it is in English, and that the component ‘not because he/she wanted it’ is justifiable in this case. Exactly the same strategy that allows us to account for the difference in meaning between the English word laugh and the Chinese word xiào can be used, I suggest, to represent the difference in meaning between the English word cry and the German word weinen: in the case of both laugh and cry, vocalization is essential (as is also the visual aspect), whereas in the case of both xiào and weinen, only the visual aspect is essential, although a reference to the vocalization (presenting it as common) is part of the conceptual structure. Consequently, the only difference between the explications of cry and weinen lies in the presence vs. absence of the word ‘often’. (The difference between cry and the present-day weep could be shown by means of the word ‘sometimes’ in the explication of weeping.) [C] She was crying

a. she was doing something for some time at the same time something was happening to some parts of her body, not because she wanted it



“Pain” and “suffering” in cross-linguistic perspective

b. people do this at many times when they feel something very bad for a short time often they do this when they think like this: “something bad is happening to me” c. when someone does it, it happens like this: something happens in this someone’s eyes because of this, there is water in this someone’s eyes other people in the place where this someone is can see it at the same time these people can hear something because of this like people in a place can hear something when someone is saying something in this place often these other people can know because of this how this someone feels

[D] Sie weinte (she was ‘crying/weeping’) (German)

a. she was doing something for some time at the same time something was happening to some parts of her body, not because she wanted it b. people do this at many times when they feel something very bad for a short time c. when someone does it, it happens like this: something happens in this someone’s eyes because of this, there is water in this someone’s eyes other people in the place where this someone is can see it at the same time often these people can hear something because of this like people in a place can hear something when someone is saying something in this place often these other people can know because of this how this someone feels

To sum up, all languages appear to recognize the phenomena described in English as laughing and crying and have words to describe them. These words may not be identical in meaning with their English counterparts, but on closer inspection, these differences can be shown to be minor. In particular, evidence suggests the following three universals in this domain: – All languages recognize that these phenomena have a cognitive and an emotive aspect; that is, that they are linked, prototypically, with a certain way of feeling and a certain way of thinking. – All languages recognize that good and bad feelings are often expressed through certain characteristic vocalizations combined with certain facial appearances. The two aspects — what can be seen and what can be heard — can be differently prioritized, but the link between the two appears to be universally recognized. – All languages interpret the visible and audible aspect of “laughing” and “crying” as something that other people in the same place can see and hear, and thus endow these phenomena with social significance. In his splendid book A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness, evolutionary psychologist Merlin Donald (2001: 264) writes: “Innate expressions,

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such as crying and laughing, are stereotypical, universal, and part of the actual emotional experience itself ”. Thus, Donald too, recognizes laughing and crying as innate and universal. This accords well with cross-linguistic evidence — with the proviso that in identifying these innate and universal forms of emotional communication we need to go beyond the English words laugh and cry. 2. “Pain” “Pain” and the human body As already mentioned, not all languages have a word corresponding to the English pain, but as evidence suggests, most, if not all, have a word referring to ‘feeling something bad in one’s body’, as the English word pain does. In his book Human Universals, Donald Brown (1991) says of his “Universal People” (“UP”) that “they know that people can feel pain”, and roughly speaking, this is no doubt true. But only roughly speaking. Attributing “pain” to other people depends on having the concept of “pain” at one’s disposal. Speakers of languages other than English may interpret the same situation through the prism of other concepts — for example, pika in Yankunytjatjara, murrumurru in Warlpiri, or douleur in French. The key common component of all these concepts is, I suggest, a reference to feeling something bad in one’s body. The basic idea that someone ‘can feel something bad in their body’ can be elaborated, conceptually, in many different ways. First, the idea can either be restricted to feeling something in one’s body or it can apply also to the whole person (not only the body), while being prototypically focussed on the body. Second, when there is a reference to the body as a primary locus of the bad feelings in question, the focus can be on the body as a whole, or on a part of the body. Third, the word in question can refer either to someone feeling something bad in the body, or to someone feeling something very bad in the body. Fourth, there can be a distinction between ‘bad feelings’ of any duration (long or short) and ‘bad feelings’ extended in time. There can be other elaborations and discriminations. But some reference to ‘feeling something bad in one’s body’ does appear to be a lexico-semantic universal. Furthermore, it appears that all languages distinguish lexically, between, on the one hand, ‘bodily bad feelings’ that suggest something bad happening in the body, and on the other, unpleasant bodily feelings that are not seen in this light (such as, for example, an itch or heartburn). For English pain, I have represented this aspect of the experience as follows:



“Pain” and “suffering” in cross-linguistic perspective

[E] She feels pain.

she feels something bad, like someone can feel when it is like this:   something bad is happening in part of this someone’s body  this someone feels something bad in this part of the body because of this   this someone can’t not think like this at this time: “I don’t want this”

“Mental pain” Zuzanna Bulat Silva argues (this volume) that both the Spanish word dolor and the Polish word ból (roughly, ‘pain’) are polysemous and have a distinct meaning referring to “emotional pain”. This may or may not be true in the case of dolor and ból (the matter is debatable), but I don’t think it is true in the case of the English pain. As I discussed in my 2012b paper ‘Is pain a human universal?’, there are various problems with the definition of pain available on the website of the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP), but as I see it, it gets things right on the crucial question of whether ‘pain’ (in the sense of the English word pain) is a unitary concept or a cover term for two distinct categories. The IASP definition mentions both a “sensory” and an “affective” dimension, but it does not treat pain as having two distinct meanings. It reads: “An unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage or described in terms of such damage.”1 The explication of pain presented here is also unitary. Like the IASP definition, it refuses to draw a sharp line between “physical pain” and “psychological pain”, while at the same time treating “physical pain” as a paradigmatic reference point for all kinds of “pain”. A number of reasons for this unitary treatment of the English pain were discussed in my 2012 article mentioned above, and also in Words and Meanings (Goddard and Wierzbicka 2014). Here, I would like to illustrate the close links between “bodily pain” and “mental pain”, as the word is used in modern English, with a few sentences from Kay Jamison’s (1997) autobiographical account of her manic depressive illness and the “pain” associated with it. Jamieson’s book, Unquiet Mind, abounds with references to her “pain” — sometimes “pain” brought on by the illness itself, sometimes, by the use — or withdrawal from — the main medication with which she was treated, lithium. Throughout her memoir, Jamieson sees her experience of madness through the prism of the concept ‘pain’.

1.  http://www.iasp-pain.org/Content/NavigationMenu/GeneralResourceLinks/ PainDefinitions/default.htm

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What pain, physical or mental? Presumably, mainly mental, but for Jamieson, the question does not arise. She uses the phrase “psychological pain” once, in relation to one of her patients, but speaking about her own experiences, she only used the word pain. Discussing her suicidal depression, she says, “It is a pitiless, unrelenting pain that affords no window of hope, no alternative to a grim and brackish existence and respite from the cold undercurrent of thoughts and feeling that eliminate the horribly restless nights of despair.” The references to thoughts and feeling, and also, to despair, make it clear that the “pain” referred to in this sentence is emotional rather than physical, yet the choice of the word pain rather than suffering suggests strongly that the experience is being likened to “relentless” bodily pain. Consider also the following passage: There was a time when I honestly believed that there was only a certain amount of pain one had to go through in life. Because manic-depressive illness had brought such misery and uncertainty in its wake, I presumed life should therefore be kinder to me in other, more balancing ways.  (Jamison 1997: 139)

It seems clear that this passage does not draw a line between “mental pain” and “bodily pain”. The expectation that her life should be “kinder to her in other, more balancing ways” may well have applied to physical health, as well as any other aspects of life. If we posited polysemy for the word pain and glossed pain in this passage as pain2 (in contrast to pain1), we would be misinterpreting, I think, the intended meaning. For Jamison, the word pain provides a way of referring to a wide range of “very bad feelings” as analogous to very bad feelings which are due to pathological processes taking place somewhere inside the body. Three examples: There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness.  (Jamison 1997: 67) The accumulated pain and uncertainty from David’s [her partner’s] death, as well as from my own illness, for several years very much lowered and narrow my expectations of life.  (Jamison 1997: 153) I could not stand the pain any longer, could not abide the bone-weary and tiresome person I had become, and felt that I could not continue to be responsible for the turmoil I was inflecting upon my friends and family. (…) it was also the only sensible thing to do for myself. One would put an animal to death for far less suffering.  (Jamison 1997: 15)

Suffering, too, can be described as either physical or mental, but, as I will discuss in the next section, the conceptualization embedded in this word does not refer to ‘something bad happening somewhere in a person’s body’ as a prototype for a wider range of feelings. This is the special feature of the word pain.



“Pain” and “suffering” in cross-linguistic perspective

3. “Suffering”

“Suffering” is not the same as “pain” Turning now to “suffering”, I will note that while according to Donald Brown (among others) “pain” is a human universal, to many other anthropologists nominate “suffering” rather than ‘pain’ as a human universal — and it is not clear how these two claims are related to one another. Are “pain” and “suffering” posited as two different human universals or as one, seen in two somewhat different perspectives? Richard Shweder (2003) speaks of the human desire “to make suffering intelligible” and of “the ways human beings [in different cultures] understand suffering” (p. 74). He also suggests that “on a worldwide scale, there seem to be seven kinds of causal ontologies (…) for comprehending and responding to suffering” (p. 76). Shweder seems to imply that “suffering” is a universal human condition, and he offers the following explanation: “To suffer is to experience a disvalued and unwanted state of mind, body, or spirit” (p. 76). Although “body” is mentioned in this definition, it is not privileged over “mind” and “spirit”. This suggests that Shweder sees “suffering” as embracing a person as a whole, without being paradigmatically linked with the body. The mention of “spirit” in Shweder’s formula is also noteworthy, in so far as it suggests something like higher consciousness. Shweder’s intuition, dictated no doubt partly by the meaning of the English word suffering, is, I think, sound. In particular, it accounts well for the fact that it is easier to apply the word pain than the word suffering to insects or worms. For example, in her family memoir George and Sam, Charlotte Moore (2005) writes of her autistic child that he was squashing caterpillars without having the faintest idea that he was causing pain. The sentence does not attract the reader’s attention as unacceptable — but it would if it said that the child was causing suffering to the caterpillars. This contrast in acceptability underscores the fact that suffering implies consciousness, whereas pain does not. It is true that in the explication of pain presented here, as [E], the last component includes a thought: ‘I don’t want this’. However, this thought is only part of the prototypical scenario: to feel pain is to feel something bad like someone can feel in the situation described in that scenario. The caterpillar does not think ‘I don’t want this’, but (from the speaker’s point of view) the caterpillar can feel like someone who does have this thought. On the other hand, in suffering (as explicated in [F] below) the sufferer does have certain thoughts. This explains why caterpillars can feel pain, but cannot suffer. Furthermore, suffering has a semantic link with the transitive verb to suffer, which means, roughly, ‘to endure’, and also,

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with words like long-suffering. I suggest that we can account for these facts if we explicate ‘suffering’ along the following lines: [F] She was suffering.

she felt something very bad for some time she couldn’t not feel like this she couldn’t not think like this at that time:   “something very bad is happening to me”

In contrast to the explication of pain, in the explication of suffering there are no references to the body. Of course suffering can be physical, as well as emotional, but the bad feelings are unspecified and do not focus (not even prototypically) on the body. As Shweder put it, suffering is a state of mind, body, or spirit, and body, and the body is not privileged over mind and spirit, in the way that it is in pain. Further, the prototypical thought in pain conveys a kind of inner protest against one’s predicament (‘I don’t want this’), whereas the thought implied by suffering includes no such component. The concept of “suffering” appears to be part of the shared European cultural heritage. The verb to suffer and the derived noun suffering have their equivalents in most, if not all, European languages, and they have a prominent place in European literature. I will cite two examples, one from Shakespeare, and one from the 19th century American poet Longfellow. O, I have suffer’d With those that I saw suffer.  Know how sublime a thing it is To suffer and be strong. 

(Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act I, sc. 2, l. 5) (Longfellow, The Light of the Stars, l. 36)

The Christian origins of the concept of “suffering” The concept of “suffering” does not seem to have equivalents in languages outside the orbit of European culture and it appears to be of Christian origin. Significantly, there are no words matching suffer and suffering in Latin. As Latin dictionaries (such as, for example, Lewis and Short (1962)) show, Latin had a transitive verb, patior, meaning, roughly speaking, ‘to endure (something)’; as in the quote from Plautus: Tu fortunatus, ego miser: patiunda sunt, ‘You are fortunate, I am wretched: such things have to be endured’. Latin also had the noun dolor, comparable to pain. It did not, however, have the lexical distinction between, roughly speaking, “pain” and “suffering”, that we find in modern European languages. This difference between Latin and modern European languages can be illustrated with the title of the Apostolic Letter issued by Pope John Paul II in 1984. The English version of



“Pain” and “suffering” in cross-linguistic perspective

this document is entitled: “Salvifici Doloris: On the Christian meaning of suffering”. The first two words of this title are in Latin, and speak of a redemptive dolor (roughly, pain), but the English part of the title uses the word suffering, not the word pain. The same is true of the translations of this document into other European languages: their titles retain, in accordance with the Catholic Church’s tradition, the Latin word dolor, but they then use the word for “suffering” (in French, souffrance, in Italian, sofferenza, in Spanish, sufrimiento, in German, Leiden, in Polish, cierpienie, and so on), rather than the word for, roughly speaking, “pain”. Judging by various dictionaries and lexicons of classical Greek, there was no word matching “suffering” in Greek either. There was a verb analogous to the Latin verb patior, and meaning something like ‘undergo, endure’, but not one equivalent to the English verb to suffer (and its counterparts in modern European languages). This supports the hypothesis that the common European concept of “suffering” is of Christian origin. Indeed, it can be hypothesized that the source of this concept lies in the phrase pathemata tou Christou ‘the suffering’ of Christ, apparently coined by St. Paul. In pre-Christian Greek, the word pathemata was used to refer to bad things that happen to people (misfortunes), rather than to the inner experience of “suffering”. St. Paul, however, used this word to refer to Jesus ‘sufferings’, as the King James Version rendered Paul’s phrase pathemata tou Christou in English. In St. Paul’s Epistles, the word translated by KJV as ‘sufferings’ (in the context of “the sufferings of Christ”) was always used in the plural and it seems to have referred not only to the bad things that are done to a person but also, perhaps even primarily, to this person’s feelings. The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (Kittel and Friedrich 1985) explains the meaning of the word pathemata (as used by St. Paul in pathemata tou Xristou) as referring, in particular, to the sufferings of Christ, and also to those that Christians must undergo as his followers. To quote: In 2 Cor. 1:5 Paul says that he shares in Christ’s sufferings, and in v. 6 he says that the readers endure the same sufferings, for in their sufferings, too, they share in those of Christ (…) In Phil. 3:10–11 the pathemata of Christ are Christ’s own sufferings, but fellowship with these is not just by a passion mysticism but by the same actual sufferings that Paul himself endures. The point is (…) that Christian suffering arises (…) but because the way of Christ entails suffering (cf. Acts 9:16; 14:22). In Col. 1:24 a parallel is again seen between the apostle’s sufferings and Christ’s afflictions. Disciples have to suffer, and therefore the absence of suffering is a lack which has to be made good. The sufferings may be severe, but Rom. 8:18 declares that they are nothing compared to the future glory.  (Michaelis 1985: 802; cf. also Bauer 1979: 634)

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Thus, my hypothesis is that the concept of “suffering” as we know it from modern European languages was born, so to speak, in the head and under the pen of St. Paul, who coined the expression pathemata tou Xristou and applied this word not only to Christ but also to Christians who must at times ‘feel very bad things’, like Christ did, and share in this way in his “sufferings”. In the King James Version of the Epistles, the key sentences are “that I may know the fellowship of his sufferings” (Phil. 3:10) and “Ye are partakers of Christ’s sufferings” (1 Pet. 4:13). The word pathemata was not used in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible undertaken (according to legend, by 70 Jewish scholars) in the third century B.C. (Michaelis 1985: 802). But in the tiny (by comparison) corpus of St. Paul’s Epistles it occurs several times. It also occurs in the epistle which is attributed to St. Peter. The same applies to the Latin word passiones (plural), which was not used in classical Latin and which Lewis and Short’s (1962) Latin Dictionary supports only with citations from St. Paul’s letters. I would further suggest that in creating this new concept, St. Paul was guided by Jesus’ words rendered in the King James Version as “the Son of Man must suffer many things” (Luke 9:22) — words which are likely to have been part of the oral tradition shared by early Christians. The Greek word used in that logion and rendered by the KJV as ‘suffer’ was pathein, and it meant something like ‘endure’ rather than ‘suffer’ (as in ‘suffering’). But the whole logion (“The Son of Man must suffer many things”) suggested a new way of thinking about very bad things that happen to us, in particular, it suggested the thought ‘I can’t not feel like this’. St. Paul’s phrase “the sufferings of Jesus” (pathemata tou Xristou) was consistent, I think, with this way of thinking, and reflected St Paul’s deep reflection on the sense of Jesus’ words as intended by Jesus himself. It is certainly a telling fact that the Apostolic Letter “on the Christian meanings of suffering” bears the Latin title “Salvifici Doloris”: evidently, there was no word in Latin corresponding to the concept expressed in modern European languages as suffering, souffrance, and so on, so a “pain-like” word (dolor) had to be used instead.

“Suffering” is not a conceptual universal In his chapter on “The ‘Big Three’ Explanations of Suffering”, Shweder (2003: 74) writes: “This chapter explores some of the ways human beings understand suffering …’, and he develops a typology of folk explanations of “suffering” across cultures. In doing so, he is using an analytical and comparative framework based on the English (and European) concept of “suffering”. While the typology developed by Shweder is very interesting and insightful, it does seem to be skewed as a result. In treating “suffering” as his common measure and seemingly assuming that it is



“Pain” and “suffering” in cross-linguistic perspective

a universal human construct, he appears to be overlooking the fact that words like pain, douleur and murrumurru (Warlpiri) share more than words like suffering and its closest relatives in non-European languages do. As a result, Shweder may be underestimating the role of the body as the universal conceptual reference point for ‘feeling something very bad’. In his typology Shweder (2003) mentions bodily afflictions as one of the seven main types (albeit the first one): “First, there is a biomedical causal ontology that is notable in its current official Western medical variety for its explanatory reference to genetic defects, hormone imbalances, organ pathologies, and physiological impairments” (p. 77). Shweder refers in this context to a cross-cultural study by L. Park (1992), who concluded that there are three primary explanations of suffering worldwide: biomedical, interpersonal and moral. Shweder comments (p. 87): Perhaps the most noteworthy finding from Park’s survey is that the biomedical ontology so prevalent in secular scientific subcultures in North America and Europe is the least frequently employed of the three most common explanations of suffering used worldwide.

The conclusion is no doubt consistent with the data, but it is partly due to the analytical framework. As I see it, the phrase “most common explanations of suffering used worldwide” is problematic, because strictly speaking no “explanations of suffering” are used worldwide. On the other hand, linguistic evidence suggests that something else is used worldwide to interpret human bad feelings: references to something bad happening to people’s bodies and causing people to feel something bad in their bodies. From this perspective, the “biomedical causal ontology” prevalent in North America appears to be closer to a human universal than Shweder’s account would suggest. What is more culture-specific about secular scientific explanations currently prevalent in the West is the sole focus on the body and on what happens in the body, and the absence of other non-biomedical frames of reference, especially religious ones. But some attention to the body as a source of many bad feelings, and a model of thinking about other bad feelings, appears to be universal.

“Suffering” and the Buddhist concept of dukkha The claim that “suffering” is a European concept of Christian origin may seem inconsistent with the fact that this word is often used in relation to other religions and cultures, in particular to Buddhism. The four “Noble Truths” of the Buddha are usually rendered in English with the help of the word suffering. To quote one Encyclopedia of Religion (Ferm 1945: 95), “The first of the Noble Truths (…) is the Truth of Suffering. (…) The second Noble Truth is the Truth of the Cause of

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Suffering. The Third Noble Truth is the Truth of the Cessation of Suffering. (…) The Fourth Noble Truth is the Truth of the Way (…) to remove Suffering”. However, as noted by the American anthropologist of Sri Lankan origin, Gananath Obeyesekere (1985), himself a Buddhist, the rendering of the key Buddhist concept of “dukkha” as “suffering” is misleading. Speaking not only of suffering but also of depression and other terms used in modern Western psychiatry, Obeyesekere points out that “Western theoretical and commonsense notions implicit in psychiatric terminology” derive from “terms from ordinary English” and do not fit indigenous concepts in places like India or Sri Lanka. From a Buddhist point of view, he comments, “life is suffering and sorrow”, but “the vocabulary of suffering and sorrow (…) is linked to specific traditions, such as those of Buddhism and Christianity”. In countries with a long Buddhist tradition, such as Sri Lanka or India, words like dukkha are “all directly or indirectly coloured by Buddhism”, whereas the English vocabulary “may reflect Christian ways of thinking”. In his book Beyond Depression, in a chapter entitled “A view from the east”, British psychiatrist Christopher Dowrick (2004: 145) comments that: “the frequent translation of dukkha as suffering has led it to be confused with the way in which the word suffering is used within the Judeo-Christian tradition”: Dukkha is still a common term in northern Indian languages such as Hindi. The Hindi meanings are quite broad. They include emotional qualities such as sorrow, grief, distress, dejection, vexation, regret, and annoyance. They also include physical aspects such as pain, misfortune, difficulty, and trouble. As a concept, it is shared with other religious traditions in India, for example, appearing frequently in the Hindu holy texts, the Upanishads. The shared view is that it is rooted in thirst or desire, and describes the essentially unsatisfactory nature of our existence.

Dowrick is drawing here on Obeyesekere’s comments, anchored in the latter’s bicultural and bilingual experience as a Sri Lankan Buddhist and American academic. The statement that according to Buddha, all life is suffering features prominently in countless scholarly and popular accounts of Buddhism, including encyclopedias and other reference works. But this statement is deeply misleading. It takes someone like Obeyesekere, an insider of American anthropology and Sri Lankan Buddhism, to notice this and to point out that words like suffering and words like dukkha are shaped by different religious traditions and carry different meanings. The key difference is that, as Obeyesekere puts it, “the cause of sorrow [dukkha] is attachment or desire or craving”, that is, something in the experiencer’s mind, whereas Christ’s sufferings were imposed on him by other people. From a Buddhist perspective, one can overcome one’s dukkha by extinguishing one’s wants,



“Pain” and “suffering” in cross-linguistic perspective

cravings and attachments (in Buddhist terminology, tanhka, literally ‘thirst’). As Rahula (1974: 37) puts it, “The abandoning and destruction of desire and craving (…): that is the cessation of dukkha”. By contrast, from the Christian perspective, developed by St. Paul, one cannot overcome one’s suffering but one can endow it with meaning. These differences are reflected in the explications below. [G] dukkha

it can be like this: someone wants some things to happen, this someone knows that these things cannot happen this someone doesn’t want some things to happen, this someone knows that these things can’t not happen this someone feels something very bad because of this

[H] suffering

it can be like this: someone feels something very bad for some time this someone can’t not feel like this this someone can’t not think like this at this time: “something very bad is happening to me”

The explication of dukkha in [G] refers to ‘wanting’ as a root cause of very bad feelings, but there is no reference to ‘wanting’ in the explication of suffering. At the same time, the explication of suffering includes the component ‘this someone can’t not feel like this’, whereas there is no such component in the explication of dukkha. The Buddhist view is that one can not feel something very bad. “The fires of greed, hatred and ignorance can be ‘blown out’ and Nirvana attained” (Smart 1989: 152). By contrast, the Christian concept of “suffering” is linked with the Gospel image of a cup that must be drunk (“Suffering cannot be extinguished, but it can be endowed with meaning”). 4. English pain vs. French douleur: A case study

‘The Man of Sorrows’ vs. ‘L’homme de Douleur’ Pain is a universal human phenomenon, but this universal human phenomenon is differently thought of in different languages, and ways of thinking about it are reflected in the meanings of words with which speakers of different languages talk about it. To find such differences one doesn’t have to look far: not only is the Warlpiri word murrumurru, roughly, ‘pain’ (cf. Goddard and Wierzbicka 2014) different in meaning from the English pain, but so is, I argue, the French word douleur.

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The crucial difference between pain and douleur is epitomized, I think, in the traditional English and French rendering of the biblical phrase “the Man of Sorrows”, originating in the Prophet Isaiah’s description of “the Suffering Servant” (53:3) and following Matthew’s Gospel, traditionally interpreted by Christians as a prophecy about Jesus’s Passion. The usual English rendering of this phrase is “the Man of Sorrows”, whereas the French rendering is “l’Homme de Douleur”, i.e. ‘the Man of Douleur’. As these two renderings suggest, douleur can embrace a person’s emotional and physical suffering in a single undifferentiated whole, whereas the English pain is more focused on physical suffering; in contexts where the suffering is seen as engulfing the whole person, body and soul, the word pain is not commonly used. According to a commentary on Isaiah by John F. Sawyer (1986: 146), the Suffering Servant’s afflictions “are described as pains and sicknesses, (…) [but] of course his suffering symbolically includes all types of suffering, ‘sorrows’ and ‘grief ’ (RSV) as well as physical pain”. But although, according to Sawyer, “the normal meaning of the words (…) is ‘pain’ and ‘sickness’ ” (ibid.), this begs the question: what is the meaning of Isaiah’s Hebrew word which would “normally” be translated into English as pain and which is rendered in French as douleur? The fact that the Revised Standard Version used the word sorrows, rather than pain, suggests that the question is not as simple as it might seem. The equivalence between douleur and pain posited by most bilingual dictionaries of French and English obscures the fact that the discourse of douleur is quite different from the discourse of pain and that these two concepts are really significantly different. The differences in question can be brought to light by comparing references to douleur in French literature with their counterparts in the English translations. In the next section, I will illustrate this by tracing the use of the word douleur in St. Thérèse’s autobiography L’histoire d’une âme and its rendering in the acclaimed English translation of the work by Ronald Knox.

St. Thérèse of Lisieux When one compares the use of douleur in the French original of St. Thérèse’s autobiography (Sainte Thérèse 2012) with its renderings in the English translation (Thérèse of Lisieux 1977), one is struck above all by the virtual absence of pain in the English text. I will present three extended examples, A, B and C. A. Thérèse aged two is given a little paper basket containing two pretty little rings made of sugar. She thinks: “What joy! There will be one ring for Céline [her sister]”. But the joy (bonheur) quickly changes to douleur when she discovers that one ring got lost on the way home. When Thérèse’s mother refuses to go back to look for it, Thérèse’s douleur becomes even greater.



“Pain” and “suffering” in cross-linguistic perspective

In the French version of the passage, reproduced below, douleur occurs three times. – « Quel bonheur ! il y aura une bague pour Céline. » Mais ô douleur! je prends mon panier par l’anse, je donne l’autre main à Maman et nous partons, au bout de quelques pas je regarde mon panier et je vois que mes bonbons étaient presque tous semés dans la rue, comme les pierres du petit poucet … Je regarde encore de plus près et je vois qu’une des précieuses bagues avait suivi le sort fatal des bonbons … Je n’avais plus rien à donner à Céline! … alors ma douleur éclate, je demande à retourner sur mes pas, maman ne semble pas faire attention à moi. C’en était trop, à mes larmes succèdent mes cris … Je ne pouvais comprendre qu’elle ne partageât pas ma peine et cela augmentait de beaucoup ma douleur … (p. 28–29)

But there are no references to pain in the English translation of this passage. Instead, we find in it a reference to “an outburst of grief ” and a feeble conclusion with “it all” substituted for douleur: “that made it all so much worse!” Most strikingly, the emotional exclamation “O douleur!” is replaced in the English version with a mere “unfortunately”: There were two pretty rings lying on the top of them, made of sugar, just the size of my finger; so I shouted “Hurrah! There’ll be one for Céline too.” But unfortunately when we left I carried the basket by its handle (my other hand being in Mamma’s), and a few yards farther on, when I looked down at the basket, I found nearly all my sweets were scattered about in the street like the stones in Hop-o’-my-thumb. A closer inspection shewed that one of my two precious rings had gone the way of the sweets — there was nothing left to give to Céline! This led to an outburst of grief; we must go back, go back! When Mamma didn’t seem to take any notice, it was too much altogether; the tears stopped, and the yelling began — how could she be so indifferent to my misery? That made it all so much worse! (p. 34)

Here are two other instances (B and C) in which douleur has been rendered as grief: B. Un jour, j’avais dit à Pauline que je voudrais être solitaire, m’en aller avec elle dans un désert lointain, elle m’avait répondu que mon désir était le sien et qu’elle attendrait que je sois assez grande pour partir. Sans doute ceci n’était pas dit sérieusement, mais la petite Thérèse l’avait pris au sérieux, aussi quelle ne fut pas sa douleur d’entendre un jour sa chère Pauline parler avec Marie de son entrée prochaine au Carmel … (p. 62) I’d told Pauline once that I’d like to be an anchoress; couldn’t we both go off into some desert a long way away? And her answer was that my ambition was hers too; only she would have to wait until I was old enough to go with her. Of course, she hadn’t meant that seriously, but it had been taken quite seriously by the small creature she was talking to. Imagine, then my transports of grief when I overheard

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my beloved Pauline, in conversation with Marie, talk about going off, quite soon, to Carmel. (p. 64) C. Avant de faire luire sur mon âme un rayon d’espérance, le Bon Dieu voulut m’envoyer un martyre bien douloureux qui dura trois jours. Oh ! jamais je n’ai si bien compris que pendant cette épreuve, la douleur de la Ste Vierge et de St Joseph cherchant le divin Enfant Jésus … (p. 112) Before any rift appeared in the clouds, I went through an ordeal which lasted three whole days, as if to make me realize something of the grief felt by our Lady and St Joseph when they had to go in search of the Child Jesus. (p. 113)

As these examples illustrate, the whole discourse of douleur characteristic of the French version of St. Thérèse’s autobiography has vanished in the process of translation into English and has been replaced with a different kind of discourse. The blurb on the cover of Knox’s translation praises it as a “wholly lucid, natural and enchanting version … the actual process of translating seems to have vanished, and a miracle wrought, as though St. Thérèse was speaking to us in English”. The translation may be lucid, natural and even enchanting, but the fact remains that when St. Thérèse is speaking to us in English she is not speaking in her own voice, and that the persona attributed to her, implicitly, by the English version is not the same as her persona in the French original. This transformation of the narrator’s persona and voice is epitomized by the substitution of “unfortunately” for “ô douleur!”, but this example illustrates a more general phenomenon: the French discourse of douleur is significantly different from the English discourse of pain. This is no doubt related to the differences in meaning between douleur and pain, which are related, in turn, to different culturally shaped ways of thinking about human feelings, and indeed, to different emotional cultures associated with, and embedded in, English and French.

Explications and explanations The explication of pain presented in Wierzbicka (2012a; 2012b) and in Goddard and Wierzbicka (2014) treats “pain” as a unitary phenomenon based on ‘someone feels something bad’, and having a bodily prototype: prototypically, a bad feeling is located in a particular part of the body: [I] He feels pain

he feels something bad,   like someone can feel when it is like this: something bad is happening to a part of this someone’s body this someone feels something bad in this part of the body because of this this someone can’t not think like this at this time: “I don’t want this”



“Pain” and “suffering” in cross-linguistic perspective

[J] She felt douleur (elle ressentait de la douleur) (French)

she felt something bad,   like someone can feel when it is like this: something bad is happening to this someone’s body for some time because of this, this someone feels something very bad in the body for some time this someone can’t not think like this at that time: “I don’t want this”

Explication [J] does not separate two different senses, one emotional and one physical, but allows both types of douleur to be covered by one formula. The prototype of the experience is physical, but unlike the physical prototype of pain, it refers to the body as a whole, and not just part of the body. It should also be noted that this explication of douleur does not present douleur as a feeling that is necessarily intense (‘very bad’) or extended in time (‘feels for some time’), but rather, as a feeling that is prototypically ‘very bad’ and lasting ‘for some time’: the phrases ‘very bad’ and ‘for some time’ appear only in the semantic prototype components. This analytical solution is compatible with phrases like une légère douleur (‘a slight douleur’) and un moment de douleur (‘a moment of douleur’), as well as with the linguistic facts which suggest intensity and duration of a typical douleur. The differences between explications [I] and [J] are not great, yet they are consistent with fairly wide-reaching differences in ways of thinking, feeling and behaving. From an Anglo point of view, physical “pain” (feeling something very bad in the body) can be intense and uncontrollable, but emotional “pain” (feeling something very bad based on certain thoughts) is not similarly uncontrollable. In Anglo culture, there are strong cultural scripts encouraging speakers to control their emotions by controlling their own thoughts. By contrast, evidence from French discourse of douleur suggests that in French culture, bodily “pain” and emotional “pain” are conceptualized as (potentially) equally overwhelming and equally engulfing the whole person. When feeling something bad in one’s body is strictly localized and not construed as engulfing the whole person, then it is likely to be described in terms of ça fait mal or j’ai mal à l’estomac (aux dents, etc.), rather than in terms of douleur. In English, on the other hand, the prototype of pain is feeling something very bad in part of the body. A feeling based on this prototype can be extended to the whole body (as in ‘she is in pain’), and even to the whole person (as in ‘the pain of betrayal’), but such extensions are unusual in English. In French, the prototype itself is global rather than localized, and the extension from the whole body to the person as a whole is natural and common. Given these differences between pain and douleur, it is hardly surprising that the traditional description of Mary as “Mater Dolorosa” from the medieval hymn “Stabat Mater Doloroda” is rendered in French as la mère des douleurs and in English, as “the grieving mother” or “the sorrowful mother” (cf. also the traditional Catholic phrase “Our Lady of Sorrows”).

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Describing the goals of the cognitive revolution of the 1950s and 1960s in his Acts of Meaning, Jerome Bruner (1990) wrote of the then new ambition to discover and to describe “the meanings that human beings created out of their encounters with the world” (p. 21). This new ambition “focussed upon the symbolic activities that human beings employed in constructing and in making sense not only of the world, but of themselves” (ibid.). It is not just a question of different human groups having different “display rules”, as Paul Ekman suggested (see e.g. Ekman et al. 1972). It is a question of different “rules” (or scripts) for feeling, as well as thinking and behaving — and in every speech community, these different scripts are embedded in, as well as transmitted through, this community’s language. As Bruner said in his Acts of Meaning (1990: 15): It’s in terms of folk-psychological categories that we experience ourselves and others. Folk psychology’s power over human mental functioning and human life is that it provides the very means by which culture shapes human beings to its requirements.

It may be difficult for speakers of French to think of douleur as one of the folkpsychological categories through which their culture shapes the speakers’ experience, expression and interpretation of their own ‘bad feelings’. Given the current position of English as a lingua franca of science, it may be even more difficult for speakers of English to think in this way about pain. Yet the English word pain does not pinpoint a human universal any more than the French word douleur does, and as we have seen, the two concepts are different, and reflect different cultural traditions and different expectations. To quote Bruner (1990: 35) once more: All cultures have as one of their most powerful constitutive instruments a folk psychology, a set of more or less connected, more or less normative descriptions about how human beings “tick”, what our own and other minds are like, what one can expect situated action to be like, what are possible modes of life, how one commits oneself to them, and so on. We learn our culture’s folk psychology early, learn it as we learn to use the very language we acquire and to conduct the interpersonal transactions required in communal life.

6. Conclusions There are indeed certain genuine human universals relating to feeling something good and feeling something bad. However, these universals can only be identified accurately from a universal human perspective, not from a perspective shaped by Anglo culture and the English language. This is why cross-linguistic evidence is



“Pain” and “suffering” in cross-linguistic perspective

critical in this project: only concepts that are demonstrably shared by different human groups can give us insight into the human condition, and human consciousness, from a pan-human point of view. In this chapter, I have built on the foundational notions of ‘good feelings’ and ‘bad feelings’, which I previously explored in my 1999 book Emotions Across Languages and Cultures: Diversity and Universals. In the Emotions book, I tentatively identified eleven hypothetical universals pertaining to emotions. In the present chapter, I have probed some of those hypothetical emotional universals further, especially the one related to “laughing” and “crying”. But while continuing my search for conceptual and experiential universals, I have also continued my campaign against pseudo-universals — especially those derived from European languages in general and from English in particular. The concepts of “pain” and “happiness” embedded in the words pain and happiness in their present-day English meanings are certainly not universal. On the other hand, evidence suggests that there some clusters of conceptual components linked with ‘good feelings’ and ‘bad feelings’ which are very salient in human ways of thinking about feelings and which are linguistically encoded in many languages. They are: 1.

something (very) bad is happening to (part of) my body now I feel something (very) bad in my body because of this I don’t want this

2.

something (very) good is happening to me now I feel something (very) good because of this I want this

These two clusters are not exactly symmetrical, because the “negative” cluster pays special attention to something happening to a person’s body, whereas the “positive” one does not have the same bodily focus. But this asymmetry itself appears to be telling us something important about human experience and human condition. In any case, the search for emotional universals detectable through languages of the world must go on — as must also the exploration of human emotional diversity; and the two are in fact inextricably linked. In his book Three Gospels, American writer Reynolds Price (1996: 21) refers, with gentle irony, to the “likably humane doctrine” of “the universality of the human heart in all times and places”. Price is right of course in suggesting that a belief in such a doctrine can be naïve and uninformed. This does not mean, however, that human hearts at different times and in different places do not share anything at all. It is the task of cross-cultural semantics to find out what it is that they demonstrably share, for such demonstrations cannot bypass language.

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References Bauer, W. (1979). A Greek-English lexicon of the New Testament and other early Christian literature. Translated by W. F. Arndt & F. W. Gingrich. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brown, D. (1991). Human universals. New York: McGraw-Hill. Bułat Silva, Zusanna. (This volume). Some remarks on “pain” in Latin American Spanish. Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of meaning. Cambridge, MA: University of Harvard Press. Donald, M. (2001). A mind so rare: The evolution of human consciousness. New York: Farrar Strauss and Giroux. Dowrick, C. (2004). Beyond depression: A new approach to understanding and managing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ekman, P., Friesen, W. V., & Ellsworth, P. (1972). Emotion in the human face: Guidelines for research and an integration of findings. New York: Pergamon Press. Ferm, V. (Ed.). (1945). The encyclopedia of religion. Secaucus, N.J.: Poplar Books. Goddard, C. (2008). Natural semantic metalanguage: The state of the art. In C. Goddard (Ed.), Cross-linguistic semantics (pp. 1–34). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Goddard, C., & Wierzbicka, A. (2014). Words and meanings: Lexical semantics across domains, languages and cultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jamison, Kay. (1997). An unquiet mind: A memoir of moods and madness. London: Picador. John Paul II. (1984). Salvifici Doloris: On the Christian meaning of suffering. Rome: Libreria Editrice Vaticana. Kittel, G., & Friedrich, G. (1985). Theological dictionary of the New Testament. (Abridged in one volume by Geoffrey W. Bromiley). Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans. Laughren, M., Hale, K., & Warlpiri Lexicography Group. (2006). Warlpiri-English encyclopaedic dictionary. Electronic files. St. Lucia: University of Queensland. Lewis, C., & Short, C. (1962). A Latin dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Michaelis, W. (1985). Pathema. In Kittel & Friedrich (Eds.), 802. Moore, C. (2005). George and Sam. London: Penguin. Obeyesekere, G. (1985). Depression, Buddhism, and the work of culture in Sri Lanka. In A. Kleinman & B. Good (Eds.), Culture and depression: Studies in the anthropology and crosscultural psychiatry of affect and disorder (pp. 134–152). Berkeley: University of California Press. Oxford English Dictionary. “weep, v.”. OED Online [accessed December 2013]. Oxford University Press. Park, L. (1992). Cross-cultural explanations of illness: Murdock revisited. Committee on Human Development, Lawrence Park, Chicago, IL. Plessner, H. (1970). Laughing and crying: A study of the limits of human behavior. Evanston: North Western University Press. Price, R. (1996). Three Gospels. New York: Touchstone. Rahula, W. (1974). What the Buddha taught. New York: Grove Weidenfeld. Sainte Thérèse. (2012). Histoire d’une âme. n.p.: Cerf et Desclée De Brouwer. Sawyer, J. F. (1986). Isaiah, Volume 2. Edinburgh: The Saint Andrews Press. Shweder, R. (2003). Why do men barbecue?: Recipes for cultural psychology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Smart, N. (1989). The world’s religions: Old traditions and modern transformations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.



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Thérèse de Lisieux, Saint. (1977). Autobiography of a saint: The complete and authorized text of ‘L’histoire d’une âme’. Translated by Ronald Knox. London: Fontana. Wierzbicka, A. (1999). Emotions across languages and cultures: Diversity and universals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ​doi: 10.1017/CBO9780511521256 Wierzbicka, A. (2012a). Is pain a human universal?: A cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective on pain. Emotion Review, 4(3), 307–317. ​doi: 10.1177/1754073912439761 Wierzbicka, A. (2012b). Is “pain” a human universal? Conceptualization of “pain” in English, French and Polish. Colloquia Communia, 1(92), 29–53. Ye, Z. (2006). Why the ‘inscrutable’ Chinese face? Emotionality and facial expression in Chinese. In C. Goddard (Ed.), Ethnopragmatics: Understanding discourse in cultural context (pp. 127–170). New York/Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

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The story of “Danish Happiness” Global discourse and local semantics Carsten Levisen

Roskilde University

According to a new global narrative, the Danes are the happiest people in the world. This chapter takes a critical look at the international media discourse of “happiness”, tracing its roots and underlying assumptions. Equipped with the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach to linguistic and cultural analysis, a new in-depth semantic analysis of the story of “Danish happiness” is developed. It turns out that the allegedly happiest people on earth do not (usually) talk and think about life in terms of “happiness”, but rather through a different set of cultural concepts and scripts, all guided by the Danish cultural keyword lykke. The semantics of lykke is explicated along with two related concepts livsglæde, roughly, ‘life joy’ and livslyst ‘life pleasure’, and based on semantic and ethnopragmatic analysis, a set of lykke-related cultural scripts is provided. With new evidence from Danish, it is argued that global Anglo-International “happiness discourse” misrepresents local meanings and values, and that the one-sided focus on “happiness across nations” in the social sciences is in dire need of cross-linguistic confrontation. The chapter calls for a post-happiness turn in the study of words and values across languages, and for a new critical awareness of linguistic and conceptual biases in Anglo-international discourse. Keywords: happiness research, Danish, global English, media discourse, Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM)

In a recent book, A Piece of Danish Happiness: One Woman Finds the Secrets of the Happiest People in the World, the Copenhagen-based American blogger Sharmi Albrechtsen (2013) sets out to discover why the Danes are the happiest people on earth. The back cover of the book reads: Despite having the highest personal tax burden anywhere, a newcomer unfriendly community and grey, gloomy weather nearly all year round, the Danes lead the world in the happiness rankings and I was determined to find out why.

doi 10.1075/bct.84.03lev 2016 © John Benjamins Publishing Company

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Albrechtsen’s story is personal but the way she portrays “Danish happiness” is in many ways representative of international media discourse. The characterization of Denmark as the happiest place on earth is presented as if it were a fact of life. The plan of the book is to present this supposed fact as a mystery (“Cold weather, wind, darkness. Bloody hell, how can one be happy?” p. 107), and to explore in what universe “high taxes” and “happiness” could ever go hand in hand. For Albrechtsen, the secret lies in unlearning what she describes as the American values of “materialism” and “ambition”. At no point in the book is it seriously questioned whether the English word happiness is an appropriate lens for studying Danish ways and values.1 Quite tellingly, Albrechtsen’s goal is to “reach a higher goal of everlasting happiness” (back cover), a very English proposition, almost untranslatable (and unthinkable) in Danish. Albrechtsen’s experience as a language migrant offers many insights, but it becomes clear from the first page that she is locked into a “happiness framework”, and that she fully subscribes to this “happiness paradigm”. In the larger scale of things, “Danish happiness” is only a small story within the much larger narrative of “happiness across nations”. This narrative is driven on by a recent, but powerful, discursive symbiosis between Anglo-International academia and the media. In this discourse, which is framed almost like a sports commentary, “happiness” has become a global competition with winners and losers: each year countries rank higher or lower in national happiness, and some lucky countries can be The Happiest Nation in the World. In this discourse, Denmark is to the world of “happiness” what Brazil is to the world of soccer: a world champion, or at least always up there among the global elite. Happiness researchers Biswas-Diener, Diener and Vittersø (2010) say: Denmark is a particularly interesting case study in happiness. Denmark consistently ranks in the top three happiest nations in international surveys of wellbeing… What could account for the chronically high happiness in Denmark?  (p. 231)

Asking why there is “chronically high happiness” in Denmark is a witty, but uncritical take on “Danish happiness”. I would rather ask: What is the evidence that the speakers of Danish are experiencing “happiness”, and not something else? The present study shows that speakers of Danish, in the so-called “happiest nation in the world”, do not (usually) talk or think in terms of the Anglo English concept of 1.  Albrechtsen does offer one reflection on the word tilfredshed ‘satisfaction, contentment’ (p. 95), as a potential translation for “happiness”, and at the same time a word that does not equal “happiness”. She dismisses this finding, by quoting Seligman, the founder of Positive Psychology, saying that this does not really matter since “satisfaction with life” is what happiness all about.



The story of “Danish Happiness”

“happiness”. Rather, the words and values guiding Danish speakers are linked to a different set of life values that are embodied in the Danish key word lykke ‘everyday well-being, happiness’ and related Danish concepts and scripts. Instead of framing a global discourse in terms of happiness, we should be studying local discourses with great care, paying attention to local words and the way they construe and capture experience. When we do this, it becomes clear that the global “happiness industry” is ignoring and misrepresenting the concepts and values that most people in the world (i.e. non-Anglos) live by. This applies equally to the big narrative of “world happiness studies” and to attempts to find the recipe for “Danish happiness”. With a few important exceptions (Wierzbicka 2004, 2010, 2011, 2014; Goddard and Wierzbicka 2014), however, critical analyses of the “world happiness” narrative are conspicuous by their absence, and the same applies, even more so, to the “story of Danish happiness”. This study is a attempt to fill this gap with a critical and semantic analysis. 1. “Danish happiness” and global discourse In Anglo-International media discourse, there is a rich body of texts linking Denmark with happiness (for book-length journalistic treatments, see Albrechtsen 2013; Booth 2014). Reports on “Danish happiness” abound with intertextual references to Danny Kaye’s song ‘Wonderful Copenhagen’, to inversions of Prince Hamlet’s famous dictum: “something is rotten in the state of Denmark”, and similar clichés. For example:

(1) And the happiest place on earth is… …the winner, once again, is Denmark.  (CBS News, Feb. 11 2009)



(2) There appears to be nothing rotten in the state of Denmark these days. For the second straight year, Denmark has been named the happiest country, according to a survey of 156 nations called the World Happiness Report. (New York Times, Dec. 11 2013)



(3) What can the Danes teach us about happiness? Danes are the happiest people in Europe, a survey suggests.  (BBC News, April 17 2007)



(4) Copenhagen really is wonderful, for so many reasons. Denmark has just come top in the UN’s survey of global happiness — far ahead of 18th-placed Britain.  (The Guardian, Saturday 7 April 2012)

The discursive point of “Danish happiness” in the Anglophone media is oftentimes not really about Denmark at all. As the examples show, the story of “the happy

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Danes” mainly functions as a springboard for discussing why the US (or Britain, or another Anglo nation) has yet again been outdone in the global happiness competition. From a historical perspective, it is striking to note that the topic of “Danish happiness” has been a game-changer in international media discourse about Denmark. Before “happiness” came along, the most common narratives about the Danes were linked to words like suicide and melancholy, so much so that the Danish-American comedian Victor Borge (1909–2000), whose career took place in the US, decided to call himself “The unmelancholy Dane” (Borge 2001). In Hendin’s (1960, 1964) groundbreaking “suicide studies” in the 1960’s, Denmark and Scandinavia used to be the common ground of reference, until “happiness research” took over. From a narrative economy perspective, there can be no doubt that the new story has benefitted Denmark’s image, and that Dano-International business uses it opportunistically. Consider, for instance, Kopenhagen Fur, whose Danish happiness story is directed at Chinese consumers, following this logic: “If you buy Danish mink skin, you can be as happy as a Dane”.

(5) Denmark is known as a country filled with warmth and happiness. It’s often ranked as the happiest country in the world and regarded as an epitome of “happiness”. Kopenhagen Fur is an auction company deeply routed [sic] in Danish traditions, and during a reception at the Danish embassy in Beijing, Kopenhagen Fur launched their new “Ms. Happiness” competition. The competition is a four-month journey to explore and share the Danish happiness.  [http://www.kopenhagenfur.com/]

A Chinese catwalk with Danish mink seems to be more compatible with the conceptual scheme encoded in the English word happiness, than with any comparable, indigenous Danish or Chinese concepts. In this sense, “happiness” is (or, is becoming) a powerful mental ontology with the potential of truly imposing happiness as a world value, through the growing global hegemony of English and Capitalism. The point here is that the English-based story of “Danish happiness” has acquired a discursive life of its own, which is a far cry from the way in which Danish-internal discourses work. It is clear from both cross-historical and cross-linguistic studies that “happiness” is not a neutral word or value (McMahon 2006; Wierzbicka 2010). Historically, happiness is a construct of modern English, formed through discourses specific to the Anglosphere, such as the pursuit of happiness and the greatest happiness of the greatest number (Goddard and Wierzbicka 2014: ch5). The very question How happy are you?, so central to happiness research, is itself an untranslatably modern Anglo question, which couldn’t have been posed in Old English or even in Shakespearean English. Linguistic evidence indicates that the English concept of



The story of “Danish Happiness” 49

happiness is not lexicalized across languages and cultures. Consequently, the current high Anglo-International interest in “happiness across nations” does not reflect a global interest. Reliance on the “happiness concept” in cross-cultural studies is flawed by the assumption that “happiness” exists in some kind of non-linguistic, a-historical, pan-human space, and that modern English “happiness” is a valid yardstick for studying the value systems of all ethnolinguistic communities. As Goddard and Wierzbicka (2014) say: How can it be valid to say that “happiness” is the ultimate human goal and ultimate human concern in every time and place if most languages of the world do not have a word (or a phrase) for it? To say, or to imply, that modern English just happens to have a word for the ultimate concern of all people around the globe, now and in the past, is profoundly Anglocentric  (p. 104)

It seems clearer than ever that the English word happiness, with its Anglo semantics and associated “Anglo” cultural scripts, has hijacked the research agenda of the study of values and locked it into an Anglocentric interpretative framework (Wierzbicka 2014). One trend is to talk about “verbal happiness” (or “subjective happiness”), in which people’s subjective judgments are measured on “happiness scales”. On the face of it, the verbal and subjective turn in “happiness studies” seems to be an ingenious move. In Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert (2007) explains: If we want to know how a person feels, we must begin by acknowledging the fact that there is one and only one observer stationed at the critical point of view. She may not always remember what she felt before, and she may not always be aware of what she is feeling right now. We may be puzzled by her reports, sceptical of her memory, and worried about her ability to use language as we do. But when all our hand wringing is over, we must admit that she is the only person who has even the slightest chance of describing ‘the view from in here’, which is why her claims serve as the gold standard against which all other measures are measured. (p. 66)

Trying to get to the “view from in there” and provide a representation which takes people’s own subjective experience seriously seems like the right way to go. The problem for “subjective happiness” is when it goes cross-linguistic, it continues to rely on a fundamentally Anglocentric questionnaire and on the conceptual scheme of English happiness, as if it were somehow a neutral, natural or necessary category for speakers of all the world’s languages.

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2. Local Danish concepts When comparing concepts such as happiness across languages and cultures, there are, seen from a purely semantic perspective, not always any obvious choices for word comparisons. In some languages, there might be no comparable words at all; in other languages, a series of words which each share some components of meaning with English happiness (see Wierzbicka 1999, 2004, 2013; Goddard & Wierzbicka 2014). In Danish, the latter scenario seems to be true. There are semiequivalents of “happiness”, and I have chosen three such Danish words for this study: lykke, livsglæde and livslyst. The selection is made partly for discursive reasons — I believe these words to be discursively relevant for a comparison with English happiness discourse, and partly for semantic reasons — all these three words can be translated as “happiness” in certain contexts. The aim is to come up with a semantic explication for these three words, and to find out how these Danish meanings have been packaged. For all three concepts, I will reflect on their semantic history, review translational practices related to the words, and give examples of lexical and discursive elaborations. I am not claiming that these three words are the only relevant concepts for comparison with happiness. For instance, the discourse of tilfredshed ‘satisfaction, contentedness’ could be another avenue to explore (see Gundelach, Iversen & Warburg 2008: 190; Levisen 2012: ch7), or the discourse of velvære ‘physical wellbeing, pleasure, comfort’ (see e.g. Greve 2010: 28). Recent conceptual influences from the Anglosphere have resulted in calques such as livskvalitet ‘quality of life’ and in the borrowing of the Anglo-Buddhist concept of mindfulness, both hugely popular concepts in Denmark at the time of writing. Each of these concepts offer a different conceptual scheme, and together they provide what we could call a linguistic worldview (on this notion, see also Šmelev 2002). The clustering of cultural concepts provide speakers with a whole grid of meanings. For instance, English words such as happiness, love, success, and related words, make up a grid through which people can talk and think about life narratives. In a similar fashion, the selected Danish words interact with other Danish-specific keywords such hygge ‘pleasant togetherness’ and tryghed ‘sense of security, peace of mind’. (On Danish cultural semantics, see Levisen (2012, 2013, 2014); Horn (2014); on Danish historical discourses of livet ‘(the) life’, see Hamann and Levisen (forthcoming)). But before we can understand how such clusters of value words work, we have to pay attention to individual words, to understand their discursive profiles and semantic configurations.



The story of “Danish Happiness”

The semantics of lykke In the 2013 World Happiness report (Helliwell, Layard & Sachs 2013), Denmark was reported to be the “happiest nation on earth” because Danes scored highest on “general happiness”. But when asked whether “they were happy yesterday”, they score very low, and drop down to the rather low “happiness level” of Rwanda and Albania. Why should this be? Before we start looking for explanations for the discrepancy, we need to understand some basic linguistic facts. First, it turns out that the Danes were never asked about their levels of happiness. They were, in fact, asked about their levels of lykke, and we cannot understand the cultural logics behind the answers if we do not understand the semantics of lykke, and the related adjective lykkelig. If we present the Danes as talking and thinking in terms of happiness, we distort the Danish insider view, and we create unnecessary enigmas, like the discrepancy between “happiness levels in general” and “happiness yesterday”. The simple explanation of the apparent enigma is that there is a two-way polysemy in lykke. There is a gradable lykke concept, roughly, the lykke of ‘everyday well-being’ and a non-gradable lykke concept, which is related to extremely positive emotions (roughly, ‘being overjoyed’) caused by rare events over which the experiencer has no or little control (for the full polysemy analysis, see Levisen (2012: ch7)). These two meanings share one word form: lykke. When people are asked to grade their lykke (How lykkelig are you?), they only have one frame available, namely the lykke of “everyday well-being”, because this is the only concept that allows for gradation. If, however, they are asked the question ‘Were you lykkelig yesterday?’, the linguistic prediction will be that the “extreme positive emotion frame” will be activated. In this case, the sentence almost reads like ‘Did anything fantastic happen to you yesterday’? The polysemy of lykke stems from certain phases in semantic evolution. Schematically, we can represent this evolution in four stages. Contemporary lykke concepts 1. The lykke of “everyday well-being” 2. The lykke of “extreme positive emotion” Historical lykke concepts 3. The lykke of “good fortune” 4. The lykke of “luck” The lykke of ‘everyday well-being’ is the most interesting one, since it appears to have developed locally in late 20th and 21st century Danish, and this lykke is the lykke which can be called a key to understanding Danish discourse. The other lykke in contemporary Danish, the lykke of “extreme positive emotion”, is older and is semantically related to German Glück and similar continental European

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concepts (for an overview, see Wierzbicka (2011)). In earlier stages of the word, we can trace two historical meanings, the lykke of “good fortune”, which still exists in a some formulaic expressions (Held og lykke! ‘Good luck’, literally, ‘fortune and good luck’), and the lykke of “fate”, which is attested in old folk songs, where phrases such as den onde lykke ‘the evil lykke’ can be found. It jars the modern Danish ear to hear lykke and ond ‘evil’ pronounced in the same phrase, but the historical development makes sense. Lykke is a cognate of English luck, and the story of lykke starts with ‘luck’, moving on to ‘good luck’ or ‘good fortune’, to the lykke of ‘extreme emotion’ (based on good things that happen out of one’s control’), and thence to lykke of ‘well-being’. This final stage of lykke deserves special attention, because it is a major diversion from the earlier semantic configurations. I will start my exploration of lykke, in the discursively most important sense, by quoting two salient lines from songs. Songs have played an enormous role in the formation of a shared sense of Danishness, and fællessang ‘communal singing’ has special place in Danish discourse of nation-building (Levisen 2012: 18). It is sometimes said that today’s semantics is yesterday’s pragmatic discourse. In the Danish case, it is particularly interesting to watch the dialectic between the discourse of song and the shaping of semantic configurations. Once fresh and novel, truths told by songs came to be adopted as shared currency by speakers, and in this way, the pragmatic discourse of songs seems to have led to semantic crystalizations. The first lykke-based song is ‘Lykken er ikke gods eller guld’ (“The lykke is not goods or gold”), with lyrics by Charles Gandrup (1847–1911). Gandrup’s negative definition of lykke appears to have been novel at the time of writing, and a part of a new anti-materialistic discursive movement. The song’s core message is that you should be thankful for what you already have in life, and not strive for material wealth. These days the title of this song, and its vision of lykke, is often alluded to in public discourse, but the title no longer causes any surprise effect: everyone knows that whatever lykke is, it is not goods nor gold. It is harder to get a full grip of what is positively meant by lykke. Maybe the answer is given in a more contemporary song, ‘Svantes Lykkelige Dag’ (“Svante’s lykkelig day”), from ‘Svantes Viser’ (“Svante’s Songs”) which in 2006 was selected for the “Danish Canon for Culture”. According to Elsnab and Knudsen (2006), this song is “a Danish classic” and the chorus line is “a line that every Dane knows” (p. 76). (6) Lykken er ikke det værste man har / og om lidt er kaffen klar ‘Lykke is not the worst thing we’ve got / the coffee’ll soon be ready’  from Benny Andersen’s poem Svantes Lykkelige Dag ‘Svante’s lykkelig day’  (1972)



The story of “Danish Happiness”

The vision of lykke depicted in this song is a solidly earth-bound lykke, in which a person is thankful for the small things in life, such as kaffe ‘coffee’ and ostemad ‘slice of bread with cheese’. Discursively, the song equates lykke with livet ‘life’, by literally changing back and forth between the two words lykke and livet ‘life’ in the chorus. This discourse has crystalized in the coinage of a new compound, hverdagslykke ‘everyday-lykke’, a metalinguistic device used to classify this lykke (as opposed to the lykke of extreme positive emotion). On the basis of this discussion, I propose the following semantic explication of contemporary lykke (in the hverdagslykke sense): [A] Explication for lykke (in its contemporary Danish sense)

a. it can be like this:   someone thinks like this: b. “I have lived for some time when I think about it now, I can say something like this about it: ‘many good things happened to me during this time, not many bad things happened to me during this time’ c. this is good, I know that it can be not like this” d. when someone thinks like this, this someone can feel something good because of this e. it is good for someone if this someone can think like this it is bad for someone if this someone can’t think like this

The lykke portrayed in explication [A] construes a scenario (a), with two main cognitive components: an assessment of life (b), including the idea that one can say that ‘many good things happened to me during this time, not many bad things happened to me during this time’, followed by an “appreciative evaluation” (c): ‘this is good, I know that it can be not like this’. (In this particular component one can see remnants of the semantics of the old “rare” and “fortunate” lykke. In that sense, this component might be the “oldest” element in contemporary lykke.) Lykke is linked to good feelings (d), but not to any extreme feelings, and certainly not to any “smile code”. (Nothing connects lykke to something like a “happy face”. The happy face icon, is simply called a smiley in contemporary Danish). Finally, the social desirability of the lykke state is encoded as a double scenario (e): ‘it is good for someone if this someone can think like this’ and ‘it is bad for someone if this someone can’t think like this’. 4. Lykke-related concepts Lykke does not stand alone. Although it might be one of the most influential words in the discourse of Danish life and living, there are other words in the lykke-cluster. I will now explore too related hubs of meaning: livsglæde and livslyst.

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The semantics of livsglæde Livsglæde ‘happiness, cheerfulness’ is a compound noun which goes back at least to 19th Century Danish (ODS, livsglæde). It is based on two words liv ‘life’ and glæde ‘joy, pleasure’. Glæde is a noun related to the English adjective glad. In English, the glad-based noun gladness does not really exist outside of literary and religious usage, but in Danish glæde is an important everyday word. Glæde and livsglæde do not match any single English concept, but can be roughly translated in a number of ways. Glæde: Livsglæde:

‘joy’, ‘pleasure’, ‘delight’, ‘happiness’, ‘enjoyment’ ‘happiness’, ‘cheerfulness,’ ‘joy of life’, ‘love of life’

Historically, the word glæde has a Lutheran protestant flavour. In tandem with the German concept of Freude, Danish glæde became a symbolic word in the Lutheran lexicon. It came to signify the proper emotional state of a true Christian man, and as such was a sign of God’s grace at work and a powerful weapon against the Devil (cf. Stolt 2004, 2012). In the Danish tradition, Luther’s thinking was formed and interpreted by Grundtvig, whose life and thinking was crucial for the formation of Danish Protestantism, as well as the formation of the Danish speech community at large (Borish 1991; Allchin & Lossky 1997). Grundvig’s approach to Christianity has often been described as Den glade kristendom ‘Happy Christianity’. To exemplify, the central Lutheran hymn Nun Freut Euch, Lieben Christen Gmein, in Grundtvig’s Danish translation, goes: (7) Nu fryde sig hver kristen mand / og springe højt af glæde Ja, lad os alle trint om land / med liv og lyst nu kvæde ‘Now rejoice every Christian man / and jump high for glæde Yes, let us all around the country / sing with life and pleasure (lyst)’  (Luther, in Grundtvig’s Danish translation 1837 [revised 1862/1888])2

While the religious ramifications of the word are no longer salient in modern secularized Denmark (Zuckerman 2008), glæde is still prominent in the Danish streetscape. For instance, the highly visible Danish Coffee franchise, Baresso Kaffe, has as its slogan Glæden ved god kaffe ‘the glæde of good coffee’, and their whole business philosophy seems to be developed from the concept of glæde. On their webpage, they say: (8) Baressos vission “Vi vil være det førende specialkaffebrand i Skandinavien og udbrede glæden ved god kaffe gennem en kæde af kaffe- og espressobarer.” 2.  From Luther’s: Nun freut euch, lieben Christen gmein / und lasst uns fröhlich springen! (1523).



The story of “Danish Happiness”

‘Baresso’s vision “We want to be the leading specialty coffee brand in Scandinavia and spread the glæde of good coffee through a chain of coffee and espresso bars.” ’  [http://baresso.com/]

Clearly, the phrase “spreading the glæde of good coffee” is Protestant phraseology turned hedonistic, no longer celebrating God’s grace towards mankind but “the goodness of the many small things in life”, such as coffee. The “pleasurable” aspect of glæde seems to be an important aspect of the contemporary concept. Consider the following newspaper headlines, all exemplifying the construction ‘glæden ved NP’: (9) Sommeren er glæden ved bare lår. ‘Summer is the glæde of bare naked thighs.’ 

[Information 28.06.2001]

(10) Glæden ved makrelmadder med mayonnaise. ‘The glæde of mackerel (on rye bread) with mayo.’  [Kristeligt Dagblad 07.08.12] (11) Glæden ved at spise en ny kartoffel der har kogt præcist i 17 minutter. The glæde of eating a fresh potato that has boiled for precisely 17 minutes.  [Jyllands-Posten 02.05.99] (12) Glæden ved foderhusets fugle. ‘The glæde of birds in the birdhouse’. 

[Ugeavisen Nordfyn 28.01.2014]

Dressing in shorts, eating mackerel, boiling a potato, watching the birds in the garden. The relatively simple cognitive scenario embedded in the glæde concept can be articulated as follows: Partial explication of glæde (prototypical cognitive scenario)

“good things are happening to me now I want these things to happen”

The prototypical cognitive scenario encodes a personal perspective on good things that happen (‘good things are happening to me’). From an outsider’s perspective, these things might be small and unimportant, but the main issue is that the person can think: ‘I want these things to happen’. The concept of livsglæde ‘life glæde’ extends the glæde concept by compounding this positive attitude, formally and semantically, with the word liv ‘life’. The concept of livsglæde also seems to encode a certain “expressiveness”, which is evident, for instance, in the missionary zeal in the language of Baresso, whose goal it is to “spread the good news of coffee”. Also, livsglæde seems to attract verbs like sprudler ‘bubbling’, stråler ‘shining’, gnistrer ‘sparkling’, all of which suggest an

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expressive and active element of meaning. Livsglæde’s discursive counterpart is the concept of livslede ‘(deep) depression’ (lit. life loathing), a strongly negative word. Based on this evidence, I suggest the following explication for livsglæde: [B] Explication for livsglæde

a. it can be like this: b. someone thinks like this:   “I live now, I live here, this is good” c. at the same time this someone thinks like this:   “good things are happening to me now   I want these things to happen” d. when it is like this, this someone can feel something very good when it is like this, this someone wants other people to know how this someone feels e. it is good for someone if this someone can think like this it is very bad for someone if this someone can’t think like this

Livsglæde begins with a simple, now-centred perspective: ‘I live now, I live here, this is good’ (essentially, the liv ‘life’ scenario). This is followed by a component where it is acknowledged that ‘good things are happening to me’ and that ‘I want these things to happen’ (essentially, the glæde scenario). In terms of feelings, livsglæde is about ‘feeling something very good’, just as its opposite livslede encapsulates ‘feeling something very bad’. The “extroverted” aspect of the concept has been captured in the component ‘this someone wants other people to know how this someone feels’. Livsglæde is, like lykke, a socially desirable thing, and for the representation, it seems necessary to intensify the phrasing so that ‘it is very bad for someone if this someone can’t think like this’.

The semantics of livslyst Livslyst is a compound based on liv ‘life’ and lyst. Lyst is a highly culture-specific Danish concept. It does not match any English words directly, but seems to encode components of meanings found in English words such as ‘pleasure’, ‘delight’, ‘desire’, ‘urge’, and ‘inclination’, all of which can be used as translations depending on context. Lyst is a cognate of lust, and there is still a polysemic sense of lyst which means something like ‘lust, sexual desire’. This additional sense will not be discussed in detail here, but it is clear that the two separate but related senses have coexisted in the language for a long time. Consider again the Lutheran hymn where every Christian man is encouraged to synge med liv og lyst ‘sing with life and lyst’. Surely, the way in which liv ‘life’ and lyst are combined in this song bears witness to the polysemy of lyst (lyst in the sense of ‘lust’ or sexual desire is absolutely absent from the hymn) and also to the historical discursive bridge between discourses of liv ‘life’ and lyst.



The story of “Danish Happiness”

In the Gyldendal Bilingual Dictionary, livslyst is indirectly defined as ‘happiness, cheerfulness’. In its entry, it simply says: “livslyst, see under livsglæde” (GRO, livslyst). Lumping livslyst and livsglæde together, and translating them both as ‘happiness, cheerfulness’ might be the most practical thing to do in a Danish-English dictionary, but this does not necessarily mean that livslyst and livsglæde are identical in meaning. While both are based on the same type of compound morphology, liv-s-N,3 and both are semantic crystalizations of Danish discourses of livet ‘(the) life’, the two N’s, lyst and glæde, are indeed different in meaning. To understand livslyst requires an in-depth understanding of the concept of lyst and the way it has penetrated Danish phraseology and habitual thinking. Essentially, the lyst concept binds together aspects of ‘doing’, ‘wanting’ and ‘feeling’. A conversational routine such as god arbejdslyst! ‘(have a) good worklyst’ is what you say to a person on leaving him or her to get on with a job. The expectation projected by this “cheerful” phrase is that the person is going to do something afterwards, that the person wants to do this, and that he or she feels something good when doing it. Lyst often combines with the preposition til ‘to, for’, as in the construction X har lyst til noget ‘X has lyst for something’, of which the closest English semantic counterpart might be ‘X feels like doing something Y’. The constructions X har lyst til (at gøre) Y ‘X has lyst for (doing) Y’ and X har ikke lyst til (at gøre) X ‘X doesn’t have lyst for (doing) X’ are important for Danish interaction and cognition. Lyst is talked about as something that people can have ‘have’, but also something that someone can miste ‘lose’. It seems to be something very valuable. The importance of taking a lyst-based approach to life and work is also recognized in Danish sayings such as Det er lysten der skal drive værket, ‘The lyst should drive the doing’. Discursively, there are two main antonyms of lyst: nød ‘need, necessity’ and pligt ‘duty, obligation’. A job done without lyst at all is not ideal. One should not do things simply motivated by the thought that ‘bad things will happen if I don’t do it’, or from the thought that ‘I can’t not do it’. Consider the following selection of fixed lyst compounds: (13) arbejdslyst ‘work-lyst’, læselyst ‘reading-lyst’, eventyrlyst ‘adventure-lyst’, købelyst ‘buy-lyst’, investeringslyst ‘investment-lyst’, virkelyst ‘being.active-lys.

In all cases, the meaning is about strongly ‘wanting to do something’ (working, reading, investing, etc.), with the motivation of ‘feeling something good’ when doing it. Further, the cognitively-based feelings in lyst seem be to based on a analogy with bodily feelings (the ‘urge’ to do it), and this is perhaps where the lyst sense 3.  -s- is an interfix, a purely formal device used in Danish compound morphology, used when two nouns (N-s-N) are combined.

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under discussion still shares an aspect of meaning with the polysemic sense of lyst ‘lust, sexual desire’. Consider now the following newspaper headings based on lyst (14–17). In (14), it is stated that the reason for becoming a teacher should be one’s lyst, that is, simply because a person wants to, knows how he or she feels about it, and wants to follow the urge of those feelings. In (15), it is reported that Michael Laudrup, Danish soccer coach, got the opportunity to advance and get a better job, but that he declined on the grounds that the lyst was not there. The lyst card seems to trump all types of motivation. In (16), an expert is stating that you don’t really have to follow rigid guidelines for exercising in the gym. In the long run, it’s much better if you simply do it som du har lyst til ‘as you have lyst for’. In (17), it is stated that the Danes do not have the lyst to pay more taxes than they already do. This is a slightly sarcastic comment, since probably noone has quasi-orgasmic feelings about skatter ‘taxes’, but the implication is clear. Since people do not lyst for it, is a bad idea to raise the income tax further. (14) Debat: Bliv lærer af lyst. ‘Debate: Become a teacher from lyst.’ 

[Jyllands-Posten 19.08.12]

(15) Michael Laudrup: Jeg havde ikke lyst til jobbet. ‘Michael Laudrup: I didn’t have lyst for the job.’ 

[Politiken 24.10.12]

(16) Motionsekspert: Træn som du har lyst. ‘Expert on exercise: Exercise as you have lyst (as you want).’  [DR 08.24.12] (17) Danskerens lyst til at betale mere i skat er til at overse. ‘The Danes’ lyst to pay more taxes is limited.’ 

[Politiken 25.06.12]

Based on these examples and the discussion, I propose the following prototypical cognitive scenario for lyst: [C] Partial explication of lyst (the prototypical cognitive scenario)

I want to do some things now I know how I feel when I do these things I want to do it because I feel something good when I do it, not because of anything else

Equipped with the core of the concept of lyst, we can now analyse the more specific concept of livslyst ‘life-lyst’: [D] Livslyst

a. it can be like this: b.   someone thinks like this: “I live now, I live here, this is good”



The story of “Danish Happiness”

c.   at the same time this someone thinks like this: “I want to do some things now I know how I feel when I do these things I want to do it because I feel something good when I do it,   not because of anything else d.   because of this, this someone can feel something very good, like people can feel when they feel something very good in the body e.   it is good for someone if this someone can think like this   it is very bad for someone if this someone can’t think like this

As we can see, livslyst shares with livsglæde a number of semantic components, starting with the basic scenario established in (b): ‘I live now, I live here, this is good’. The (c) component adds the concept of lyst to this scenario. In component (d), the quasi-orgasmic element of livslyst is modelled. Very good feelings are anchored in a bodily comparison ‘like people can feel when they feel something very good in the body’. Finally, the (e) component models the social desirability of livslyst. Like with livsglæde, it is suggested that livslyst encodes ‘it is good for someone’ to think like this, but ‘very bad for someone’ to not think like this at all. 5. Lykke-related cultural scripts In the previous sections, I have sought to capture meanings encoded in Danish words. In the following, I am going to dig deeper into the cultural meanings, which are not encoded in single words but which are still part and parcel of the larger Danish linguistic worldview. First, I will take a closer look at the two core lykke sayings already mentioned in the previous section, in order to tease out more precisely the sentiments they encode. After that, I will address two lykke-related cultural scripts for verbal behaviour. They capture a link between ‘thinking’ and ‘saying’, which I believe to be important to ethnopragmatic studies of life narrative and cultural values (cf. Goddard 2006, 2009; see Levisen 2012; Trushima 2013). Arguably, the two most high-profile lykke-sayings in Danish contemporary discourses are Lykken er ikke gods eller guld and Lykken er ikke det værste man har. These two phrases are often alluded to in sociological lykke literature (e.g. Greve 2010), but are rarely given the attention they deserve. Saying 1: Lykken er ikke gods eller guld ‘The lykke is not goods nor gold’

In this saying, goods and gold stand for possessions and money, representing “materialistic” values, and the discursive function of the saying to express something like an “anti-materialistic” attitude. This attitude seems to be widespread in

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the speech community (cf. also Albrechtsen’s observations). The current Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt has been renamed Gucci-Helle by the Danish public, as a linguistic punishment for wearing Gucci handbags — to the Danish mind, a symbol of materialism and superficiality. The perception encoded in the Gucci-Helle construal mocks the Danish leader, and portrays her as a person without values in life (the expected kind of values, that is). We can articulate this anti-materialistic sentiment as in [E]. [E] A Danish cultural script for, roughly, “anti-materialism” many people think like this:   it is bad if someone thinks like this: “I want many things to belong to me if these many things don’t belong to me, I can’t live well”

While [E] is an anti-script (‘it is bad if someone thinks like this’), the positive, preferred attitude is elaborated in the second saying: Saying 2: Lykken er ikke det værste man har ….. ‘The lykke is not the worst we’ve got…..’

Unlike the first saying, which is pretty straightforward in its attitudinal coding, this phrase requires a bit more analysis. The ingenuity of the phrase lies in its iconic relation between the semantic content and the pragmatic expression. The sentiment is based on an attitude of “savouring the small things in life”, and the pragmatic phrasing is packaged in a feel-good understatement. The song presents an idealization of all things small, such as having a morning shower, watching a bird in the garden, or eating rye bread with cheese. Both lykke and lykke-related meanings seem to cater for this attitude, which we can articulate as follows: [F] A Danish cultural script for, roughly, “savouring the small things in life” many people think like this:   it is good if someone thinks like this: “good things are happening to me I want to think about these things like this: ‘these things are small things’ I want to know well what these things are like” if someone thinks like this, this someone can feel something very good at many times if someone thinks like this, this someone can think like this at the same time: “I don’t want more” this is good

The aspect of thinking articulated in [F] portrays an “appreciative” approach to life, in which one pays attention to things in their smallness and familiarity, and feels something very good because of it. At the same time, the attitude seems to be that thinking in this way leads to a mental state where one is able to think: ‘I don’t



The story of “Danish Happiness”

want more’ (this attitude is probably what, from Albrechtsen’s (2013) American perspective, comes across as “lack of ambition”). Having articulated these scripts for general sentiments, we can further articulate two specific scripts related to preferences in verbalization. Using the insights from lykke semantics, we can argue for script [G], as a highly dispreferred way of telling one’s life narrative: [G] Danish cultural script against the verbalization of “life dissatisfaction” many people think like this:   it is very bad if someone says something like this: “I have lived for some time during this time, at many times I didn’t feel something good”

Based on the semantics of lykke and related concepts, we can further propose a verbal taboo script against something like verbalizing a pessimistic or depressed attitude [H]: [G] A Danish cultural script against the verbalization of “pessimism/depression” many people think like this:   it is very bad if something says something like this: “good things can’t happen to me I can’t feel anything good anymore”

It seems that Danish words and attitudes present a linguistic worldview in which lykke is the default. Concepts and scripts which go against semantics of lykke and its related pragmatic discourse are discouraged. 6. Concluding remarks An old Danish saying goes: Som man spørger i skoven får man svar ‘So you ask in the forest, you will be answered’. If you ask people about lykke, you cannot expect their answers to echo in the same way as if you had asked them about happiness. This is precisely why the discourse of “Danish happiness” needs to be deconstructed and retold as the story of lykke. At the same time, we need to monitor closely the monopoly of Anglointernational happiness concepts and the global spread of happiness discourse. The story of “Danish happiness” has acquired a discursive life on its own. Despite the fact that lykke, rather than happiness, is the key concept in Danish-internal discourse, happiness is now a force to be reckoned with in Dano-international relations.

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We need a “post-happiness” era in the study of human values, which does not take for granted that speakers operate (or should operate) within the Anglo happiness worldview. To put it more bluntly: Seen from the perspective of a Danish linguist, the project of “world happiness studies” is a hoax. To achieve a genuinely “verbal” turn in the study of values, it is necessary to give much more attention to words, both language-internally (e.g. are we talking about lykke or livsglæde?) and cross-linguistically (e.g. are we talking about lykke or happiness). We need to clearly see through The Happiness Hoax, and come to understand that there is more to human values than happiness. The “post-happiness” research question should be framed in a much more open way: What words, concepts and values, do people live by across languages and cultures? Equipped with shared human concepts such as ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘think’, ‘want’, ‘live’, and ‘feel’, we can start analyzing the diversity of human values in their culture-specific configurations, and achieve a new precision in cross-linguistic comparison.

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Borish, S. M. (1991). The land of the living: The Danish folk high schools and Denmark’s nonviolent path to modernization. Nevada City: Blue Dolphin Publishing. Booth, M. (2014). The almost nearly perfect people. The truth about the Nordic miracle. London: Jonathan Cape. Borge, V. (2001). Smilet er den korteste afstand. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. DDO. Den Danske Ordbog. Copenhagen: Det Danske Sprog og Literaturselskab. [http://ordnet. dk/ddo] Elsnab, P., & Knudsen, J. N. (2006). Svantes Viser. Kulturkanon.dk: Din guide til den danske kulturkanon. Retrieved, Oct. 2013. Gilbert, D. (2007). Stumbling on happiness. New York: Vintage Books. Greve, B. (2010). Et lykkeligt land? Hvad skal der til og kan velfærdssamfundet bidrage. Frederiksberg: Samfundslitteratur. Goddard, C. (2006). Ethnopragmatics: A new paradigm. In C. Goddard (Ed.), Ethnopragmatics: Understanding discourse in cultural context (pp. 1–30). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.  doi:  10.1515/9783110911114.1

Goddard, C. (2009). Cultural scripts. In G. Senft, J-O. Östman & J. Verschueren (Eds.), Culture and language use (pp. 68–80). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ​doi: 10.1075/hoph.2.07god



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Goddard, C., & Wierzbicka, A. (2014). Words and meanings: Lexical semantics across domains, languages, and cultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. GRO Gyldendals Røde Ordbøger. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Gundelach, P., Iversen, H.R., & Warburg, M. I Hjertet af Danmark. Copenhagen: Hans Reitzels Forlag. Hamann, M., & Levisen, C. (Forthcoming). Talking about livet ‘life’ in Golden Age Danish: Semantics, discourse, and cultural models. In S. Waters & C. Levisen (Eds.), Cultural keywords in discourse. Helliwell, J., Layard, R., & Sachs, J. (2013). World happiness report. New York: Sustainable development solutions network. Hendin, H. (1960). Suicide in Denmark. Psychiatric Quarterly, 34, 443–460.  doi:  10.1007/BF01562425

Hendin, H. (1964). Suicide and Scandinavia: A psychoanalytical study of culture and character. New York: Grune and Stratton. Horn, N. (2014.). Child-centred Semantics: Keywords and Cultural Values in Danish Language Socialization. MA thesis, Aarhus University. Levisen, C. (2012). Cultural semantics and social cognition: A case study on the Danish universe of meaning. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. ​doi: 10.1515/9783110294651 Levisen, C. (2013). On pigs and people: The porcine semantics of Danish interaction and cognition. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 33, 344–364. ​doi: 10.1080/07268602.2013.846455 Levisen, C. (2014). Scandinavian Semantics and the Human Body: An Ethnolinguistic Study in Diversity and Change. Language Sciences. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2014.05.004 McMahon, D. (2006). Happiness: A history. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. Šmelev, A. D. (2002). Russkaja jazykovaja model’ mira: Materialy k slovarju. Moscow: Jazyki Slavjanskoj Kul’tury. Stolt, B. (2004). Luther själv: Hjärtats och glädjens teolog. Skellefteå: Artos. Stolt, B. (2012). “Laßt uns fröhlich springen!” Gefühlswelt und Gefühlsnavigierung in Luthers Reformationsarbeit. Eine kognitive Emotionalitätsanalyse auf philologischer Basis [Studium Litterarum, 21]. Berlin: Weidler Buchverlag. Trushima, N. (2013). Cultural semantics in a post-soviet virtual diaspora. The discursive construction of Denmark and the Danes by Russian language migrants. MA thesis, Aarhus University. Wierzbicka, A. (1999). Emotions across languages and cultures: Diversity and universals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ​doi: 10.1017/CBO9780511521256 Wierzbicka, A. (2004). ‘Happiness’ in a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective. Daedalus, 133, 34–43. ​doi: 10.1162/001152604323049370 Wierzbicka, A. (2010). The “history of emotions” and the future of emotion research. Emotion Review, 2, 269–273. ​doi: 10.1177/1754073910361983 Wierzbicka, A. (2011). What’s wrong with “happiness studies”. The cultural semantics of happiness, bonheur, Glück and Sčast’e’. In I.M. Boguslavskij, L.L. Iomdin, and L.P. Krysin Slovo i Jazyk (pp. 155–171). Moscow: Jazyki slavjanskoj kultury. Wierzbicka, A. (2014). Imprisoned in English: The hazards of English as a default language. New York: Oxford University Press. Zuckerman, P. (2008). Society without God: What the least religious nations can tell us about contentment. New York: New York University Press.

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The meaning of “happiness” (xìngfú) and “emotional pain” (tòngkŭ) in Chinese Zhengdao Ye

Australian National University

This chapter undertakes detailed meaning analyses of xìngfú, a concept central to contemporary Chinese discourse on “happiness,” and its opposite tòngkŭ (‘emotional anguish/suffering/pain’). Drawing data from five Chinese corpora and applying the semantic techniques developed by Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) researchers, the present study reveals a conceptualization of happiness that is markedly different from that encoded in the English concept of happiness. Particularly, the analysis shows that the Chinese conception of xìngfú is relational in nature, being firmly anchored in interpersonal relationships. Loosely translatable as ‘a belief that one is loved and cared for’, xìngfú reflects the Chinese idea of love, which places emphasis on actions over words and is intrinsically related to other core cultural values, such as xiào (‘filial piety’). The chapter relates semantic discussion directly to recent research on happiness and subjective well-being involving Chinese subjects, highlighting and problematizing the role of language in the emergent and fast-growing field of happiness research and stressing the important role of culture in global “happiness studies”. Keywords: happiness studies, pain, subjective well-being, Chinese emotion, Chinese corpora, Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM)

The study of “happiness” as a new science: what’s missing? Happiness studies have, in recent decades, become “a new science.” This is clearly reflected in the title of one of the field-defining books Happiness: Lessons From A New Science, written by the distinguished economist Richard Layard (2005; see also the chapter titled ‘Happiness: a New Science’ in Graham 2011). As a subject of enduring significance, “happiness” is no longer confined to its custodian disciplines of philosophy, theology, and psychology. The contemporary idea that “happiness” has an important role to play in a nation’s growth and productivity has not

doi 10.1075/bct.84.04ye 2016 © John Benjamins Publishing Company

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only drawn scholars of different disciplines to this subject and rekindled many lively debates (e.g. American Academy of Arts and Sciences 2004 and the Journal of Happiness Studies founded in 2000), but also brought it to the attention of the public across the globe, as seen in the now frequent media reporting on “happiness nations” (see also the World Happiness Report commissioned for The 2nd United Nations Conference on Happiness, Helliwell et al. 2012). In the growing new science of “happiness,” exemplified by the kind of work carried out by Layard and by the psychologist Ed Diener and colleagues (e.g. Diener and Suh 2000; Biswas-Diener et al. 2004) on the comparative sociology and psychology of happiness and subjective well-being (known as SWB), a widely used method is, not surprisingly, self-report based on questionnaires. For example, Layard writes: The most obvious way to find out whether people are happy in general is to survey individuals in a random sample of households and ask them. A typical question is, “Taking all things together, would you say you are very happy, quite happy, or not very happy?” (Layard 2005: 14)

When research is carried out cross-linguistically with speakers from non-English backgrounds, it can be expected that the terms relating to English happiness require translation, as demonstrated by the following research carried out in South Korea and the People’s Republic of China (PRC): In South Korea and the PRC, the questionnaires were translated into the vernacular by bilingual speakers who were native speakers of those languages. In the case of certain SWB measures, a translation and back-translation method was used.1 (Diener et al. 1995: 16)

The critical role that self-report, and more generally, language, plays in happiness research cannot be emphasized enough. To quote Layard again: Of course one could question whether the word “happy” means the same thing in different languages. If it does not, we can learn nothing by comparing different countries. (Layard 2003: 16)

Despite the general awareness amongst happiness researchers that concepts of concern in different languages must be equivalent in their meaning in order to make cross-cultural studies comparable, in practice there seems to have been rather scant attention paid to these matters. Having acknowledged the importance of 1.  It should be stressed that back-translation cannot be taken as reliable and absolute evidence for establishing meaning equivalence. Interestingly, recent research on the cognitive aspects of the translating process has shown that first responses are often not reliable (see e.g. Malmkjær 2011).



The meaning of “happiness” (xìngfú) and “emotional pain” (tòngkŭ) in Chinese

establishing the meaning equivalence of the concepts under investigation, Layard, for example, takes a surprisingly different turn by saying: However countries can be rated separately on the different measures: how ‘happy’ they are, how ‘satisfied’ they are, and what score they give to life, using a scale running from ‘worst possible life’ to the ‘best’. The ranking of countries is almost identical on all three measures. This suggests that words are not causing a problem. … Moreover there is direct evidence, for a number of languages, that the words do have the same meaning in different languages. For example a group of Chinese students were asked to answer the happiness question, once in Chinese and once in English, with two weeks between the two events. The students reported almost exactly the same average level of happiness in both Chinese and English, and the answers in the different languages were highly correlated across the students. Since the English and Chinese languages are very far apart, this finding is highly reassuring. (Layard 2003: 16–17)

Is it true that “words are not causing problems?” Is such ‘linguistic optimism’ warranted? Wierzbicka’s studies (2004, 2011), for example, have shown clearly and revealingly that words are causing problems. Even between closely related European languages, happiness-like concepts do not match exactly (see Levisen this volume). One may also ask on what basis the finding can be deemed to be “highly reassuring,” when the sole evidence to prove the meaning equivalence of the questions posed in English and in Chinese is the supposed equivalent results themselves based on back-translation. While various cross-linguistic and cross-cultural studies on happiness invariably refer to Shao’s (1993) study when Chinese SWB is discussed, virtually no Chinese words or the Chinese version of the questionnaire have been produced. Readers are often left wondering what exactly the native words in question are. This naturally raises the question of what is being compared. One can only assume that the Chinese term in question is xìngfú (幸福), which is central to the contemporary “happiness discourse” in Mainland China and which is present in the official translations of Gross National Happiness (GNH) (guómín xìngfú zŏngzhí 国民幸福总值) and the National Happiness Index (NHI) (guómín xìngfú zhĭshù 国民幸福指数).2 The question here, of course, is whether xìngfú means exactly the same as happiness or happy.

2.  It is interesting to note that xìngfú has also been used to translate the concept of “well-being”. The technical term SWB is generally known among Chinese scholars as zhŭguān xìngfúgăn (主 观幸福感), which means literally ‘subjective sense of xìngfú’. However, when used in less technical contexts and in mass media, the modifier zhŭguān (subjective) is often dropped and only xìngfúgăn (幸福感) is used (e.g. see its use in Forbeschina.com). A keyword search of xìngfúgăn carried out in Forbeschina.com on 9 December 2013 brought up 139 articles.

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What seems to be conspicuously missing in comparative studies involving Chinese subjects are knowledge and understanding of the native concepts with which local people talk and think about “happiness.” The main purpose of this chapter is, therefore, to re-direct researchers’ attention to two fundamental questions: What are the indigenous “happiness” concepts in Chinese? And what do they mean? The chapter will focus on xìngfú because of its central role in contemporary Chinese discourse on “happiness”, both at the official level and in people’s daily experience. Since xìngfú 幸福 is often contrasted with tòngkŭ 痛苦 (‘mental anguish’), the chapter will also discuss the meaning of the latter, so as to place the concept of xìngfú in a broader conceptual and lexical network. In this way, we are able to see how Chinese speakers conceptualize xìngfú in relation to other experiences. The ultimate goal of the chapter is to simultaneously highlight and problematize the role of language in the emergent and fast-growing field of happiness research. 2. Methodology and data sources Attending to the above-mentioned two fundamental “what-questions” means this study will privilege “experience-near concepts” over “experience-distant concepts”, a distinction first made by Geertz (1976) (see also Wierzbicka’s discussion (1999: 10–11) on this distinction). “Experience-near concepts” are those which “an individual… might himself naturally and effortlessly use to define what he and his fellows see, feel, think, imagine, and so on, and which he would readily understand when similarly applied by others” (Geertz 1976: 58). By starting from “experience-near concepts”, the present study places itself firmly in the tradition of ethnopsychological studies of emotions and value concepts, where local perspective and understanding are of central concern to researchers, and the issues of translation and interpretive language are not taken lightly, but problematized and carefully examined. As Kirkpatrick and White (1985: 13) wrote, “[g]iven the central place of conceptual structures and interpretive routines in our approach to ethnopsychology, issues of linguistic meaning and translation are of particular importance in the task of ethnographic description…so understanding what is being said is a minimal requirement of ethnopsychological research.” To understand what is being said in the target language is by no means easy. It is both a formidable and delicate undertaking, demanding on the part of the researcher “an effort to disentangle my own native emotional understandings from theirs,” to quote the psychological anthropologist Catherine Lutz (1995: 253). The recognition of the cultural biases inherent in the researcher’s own language accentuates the need to use a culture-sensitive descriptive and interpretive language in



The meaning of “happiness” (xìngfú) and “emotional pain” (tòngkŭ) in Chinese 69

making sense of what is being said. An ideal solution to this dilemma is provided by the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM). This is because the 65 or so conceptual primes that make up this metalanguage, which have been identified through decades of extensive and principled investigation and cross-linguistic research, represent the shared concepts of all people (Goddard and Wierzbicka 1994, 2002, 2014). Thus, the exponents of these universal primes in any one language can be regarded as constituting the most basic “experience-near” concepts within a language and culture. Using this metalanguage allows the researcher to be positioned within a local meaning system and adopt an experience-near perspective, while at the same time making that perspective accessible to culture-outsiders. At the same time, it serves as a tertium comparationis, a common measure, which is needed for any apt cross-linguistic comparison to take place (see Ye 2013). By way of elucidating the meaning of xìngfú, the chapter will compare it to the contemporary meaning of English happy and happiness, since the standard questions posed to the subjects across the globe in the “happiness” research typically include “Are you happy?” The Chinese word xìngfú can be used as either a noun or an adjective. Thus, it will be helpful if the semantic explications (definitions phrased in NSM, cf. Goddard and Wierzbicka 2014) of both happy and happiness are provided here. They read as follows:3 [A] Semantic explication of happy (as in He was happy)

a. this someone (he) thought like this for some time at this time: b.   “many good things are happening to me now as I want c.   I can do many things now as I want d.   this is good” e. because of this, this someone felt something good at this time f.   like people feel at many times when they think like this for some time

[B] Semantic explication of happiness (as in Money doesn’t bring happiness) a. it can be like this: b.   someone thinks like this for some time: c. “many good things are happening to me now as I want d. I can do many things now as I want e. this is good”

The detailed semantic analysis of xìngfú and its opposite tòngkŭ will involve a close examination of a large body of examples taken from a range of sources, including

3.  The explications are based on Wierzbicka (1999, 2004) and Goddard and Wierzbicka (2014: 103–5). See Goddard and Ye (this volume) for discussion of these explications. See also Goddard and Wierzbicka (ibid.) for how the contemporary meaning of happiness differs from its older meanings.

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autobiographical writings, Sina Weibo (the Chinese equivalent of Twitter), and Chinese language corpora. The rest of the chapter will be divided into four sections. In the next section, a detailed meaning analysis of xìngfú will be undertaken and the implications of Chinese happiness research centring on the notion of xìngfú will also be discussed. The third section will look at the notion of xìngfú from the point of view of its opposite tòngkŭ (‘mental anguish’). The conceptual issues arising from this study will be further discussed in Section Four. Some directions for future research will be pointed out in the final section. 3. Focusing on xìngfú 3.1 Frequency data The concept of xìngfú is of great importance to Chinese people. Numerous TV series and songs revolve around this topic and explicitly contain the term xìngfú in their titles (some of which will be mentioned below). The salience of the concept is also reflected in the frequency data extracted from five Chinese language corpora, as listed in Tables 1–4. The Leiden Weibo Corpus (LWC) mentioned in Table 1 represents the most recent language usages. In order to view the frequency data of xìngfú in a meaningful way, information on the frequencies of its synonym kuàilè and its standard opposite, tòngkŭ, is also given in these tables.4 Table 1.  Frequency data based on Leiden Weibo Corpus (LWC)5 Instances (hits) Frequency (per million words) Frequency rank

xìngfú 102,827 1014 122nd

kuàilè 146,761 1447 83rd

tòngkŭ 19,576 193 611th

happy 5,748 57 1735th

4.  Due to space limitations, the meaning of kuàilè will not be discussed in this chapter. See Ye (2006a) for the meaning of the related, but distinct concept lè. 5.  Sina Weibo is China’s most popular microblogging service which boasts more than 500 million regular users and over 100 million messages exchanged every day. The 5.1 million messages contained in the Leiden Weibo Corpus (LWC, van Esch 2012) were posted on Sina Weibo in January 2012. They consist of 101.4 million words, of which 1.37 million are distinct words. 44.58% of the messages were posted by men and 55.42% by women. LWC contains many English words popular among young people, happy being one of them. This feature makes LWC unique among the Chinese language based corpora. The likely reason for the exceptionally high frequency of kuàilè is explained later on.



The meaning of “happiness” (xìngfú) and “emotional pain” (tòngkŭ) in Chinese

Table 2.  Raw frequencies based on the corpus compiled by the Centre for Chinese Linguistics, PKU (CCL)6 CCL

xìngfú 12,593

kuàilè 7,824

tòngkŭ 15,823

Table 3.  Raw frequencies generated by Chinese Text Computing (CTC)7 Corpus News General fiction

xìngfú   328 1,803

kuàilè   127 1,278

tòngkŭ   254 2,400

Table 4.  Frequency data based on the UCLA Written Chinese Corpus (UCLAv2) and the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese (LCMC2)8 Corpus LCMC2 UCLAv2

Instances (hits) Frequency (per million words) Instances (hits) Frequency (per million words)

xìngfú   61   59.74 174 158.6

kuàilè   26   24.46 157 143.1

tòngkŭ   92   90.1 134 122.14

Several trends can be discerned from the frequency data. First, generally speaking, xìngfú is of higher frequency than its related word kuàilè in all corpora, with the exception of LWC (van Esch 2012). The higher frequency of kuàilè in LWC can be explained by the fact that an overwhelmingly large number of the instances of kuàilè occurred in the contexts of Shēngrì Kuàilè (‘Happy Birthday’), as one would expect in the twitter-like Sina Weibo. For the same reason that the data based on social media are more transient and public in nature, tòngkŭ (‘mental anguish’) scored a much lower frequency. Second, in the corpora that contain primarily literary texts, such as CCL (PKU 2009) and CTC (general fiction) (Da 2007), tòngkŭ (‘mental anguish’) has the highest frequency, followed by xìngfú and then by kuàilè. This may have something to do with the fact that a primary concern of the Chinese literature (and perhaps literature in general) has always been to depict the plight of human existence. Third, in the corpora that are based on language usages 6.  The CCL corpus (PKU 2009), which contains 477 million characters, consists of two subcorpora, Modern Chinese and Ancient Chinese. The frequency data (hits) presented here are based on the Modern Chinese corpus, which contains 307 million characters and is predominantly based on literary texts. 7.  Da (2007). The statistics were based on bigram (two-character) research. 8.  The second edition of the UCLA Written Chinese Corpus (UCLA2) (Tao and Xiao 2012), which has been expanded to one million words, complements the older Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese (LCMC) (McEnery and Xiao 2004).

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available from the internet, such as LWC (van Esch 2012) and UCLAv2 (Tao and Xiao 2012), we witness the rise of frequency in the uses of both xìngfú and kuàilè. However, the uses of the former still outnumber those of the latter. Clearly, xìngfú is something that matters a great deal to Chinese speakers. The status of xìngfú as a key and salient concept in contemporary Chinese society is not in question. But what exactly does it mean? Does it, as indicated by most of the Chinese-English bilingual dictionaries (e.g. DeFrancis 1997), mean happiness and happy? 3.2 The meaning of xìngfú A careful examination of the examples taken from the above-mentioned corpora and from several autobiographies, aided by the use of contextual substitution tests and diagnostic questions, reveals that the meaning of xìngfú is markedly different from that of happy or happiness in English. 9 Perhaps the single most important difference is that the notion of xìngfú is earthly happiness that is anchored in an interpersonal relationship. It depicts a state of mind sustained by an expansive and gratifying feeling that stems from the belief that one is cared for and loved. This interpersonal and interdependent aspect of the meaning is most illuminatingly captured in the following examples:

(1) 他又说: “我那时真就是想出名, 出了名让别人羡慕我母亲. ” 我想, 他比 我坦率. 我想, 他又比我幸福, 因为他的母亲还活着. 而且我想, 他的母亲 比我的母亲运气好, 他的母亲没有一个双腿残疾的儿子, 否则事情就不 这么简单.  (Shi 2000: 13) “I was dying to be recognized at that time, so that other people could admire my mother,” he added. I thought he was more candid than me. I thought to myself: he is also happier (xìngfú) than me, because his mother is still alive. I also thought that his mother had better luck than my mother, because his mother did not have a quadriplegic son; otherwise, things wouldn’t have been that simple.

9.  The three autobiographies are (i) the late writer Shi Tiesheng’s (2000) collection of essays and reflections on his life as a quadriplegic following delayed treatment when he was a ‘sent down’ youth during the Cultural Revolution, (ii) Zhang Shurong’s (2001) account of her battle with cancer, and (iii) the journalist An Dun’s (1998) edited volume recording ordinary people’s emotional lives, a watershed book which heralded a new genre of kŏshùshílù (lit. ‘faithful recordings of oral accounts’) in Mainland China.



The meaning of “happiness” (xìngfú) and “emotional pain” (tòngkŭ) in Chinese



(2) 此时你是多么幸福, 你同你所爱的人在一起, 在蓝天阔野中跑, 在碧波白 浪中游, 你会是怎样的幸福! (Shi 2000: 48) At this moment, how happy (xìngfú) you are. You are with the person you love, running in the open field under the blue sky and frolicking in the green sea and white waves. What happiness (xìngfú) you have!

(3) 我们俩在一起会很幸福, 同时他也是给我伤害比较深的一个人 — 他的 感情在我之前的差不多两年中非常混乱…… (An 1998: 181) We will be very happy (xìngfú) together. At the same time, he is also the one who has hurt me deeply — his emotional life was chaotic before I knew him two years ago.

(4) 长风, 就是常发疯: 想吃我妈包的粽子, 要是她现在给我打电话让我回家, 我肯定买今晚半夜的机票去～～～能会家的人都是幸福的! (LWC) Missing the bamboo-leaf wrapped glutinous dumplings mum makes. If she rings me now asking me to go home, I will not hesitate to take the midnight flight home… Those who can return home are happy (xìngfú) ones!

(5) 长华村闺女儿: 天渐渐黑了, 不知道为何此时好失落. 在家真的很幸福. 很知足. 原来在家上班那么幸福, 好像又回到上学父母准时饭菜做好 …… (LWC) It is getting dark. I don’t know why I feel so lost right at this moment. Being at home makes me feel really happy (xìngfú) and very content. I didn’t realize that working at home could make one feel such happiness (xìngfú). I was taken back to my school years when mum and dad prepared every meal for me.

(6) Happy 的小燕子: 走进房间, 发现我妈在我床头挂了两个香袋, 好幸福!  (LWC) Walking into the room, I discovered that mum had put two scented pockets above my bed head — such happiness (xìngfú) I have!

(7) 杨绒仙老人多有福气! 儿媳乔焕过给她准备了两床被褥, 四件棉单衣. 我 注意到, 一个老大娘摸着衣褥, 眼里透出了幸福的泪花, 而另一位老翁则 唉声叹气, 看完后蹲到了墙角, 恐怕是自叹儿孙弗如吧.  (LCMC2) How lucky the old lady Yang Rongxian is! Her daughter-in-law prepared two sets of quilts and four cotton blouses for her. I noticed that a granny’s eyes were filled with tears of happiness (xìngfú) when she was caressing the clothes and quilts, whereas an old man left the scene quietly and squatted in a corner, sighing despondently.

(8) 有人永远爱着你是多么的幸福、多么的宝贵、多么的不容易啊!  (LCMC2) When there is someone who loves you forever, what happiness (xìngfú) you have. How precious and difficult it is!

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These examples show that the notion of xìngfú is bound up with a deep sense of connection with others. However, the connection is not with just anyone, but with family members or with those one is in love with. These examples also indicate that the feeling of xìngfú is derived from, and perhaps one can even say, granted by what the ‘relational’ others have done for the experiencer. The other-dependent nature of the meaning of xìngfú is tellingly reflected in the following example, where the wife is described as bú xìngfú (‘not happy/no happiness’) because of the dysfunctional relationship with her husband: (9) 听说, 婚后很不幸福, 两个人常常打架.  (UCLA2) Apparently, she was not happy after they got married. They were often in fights.

The common expression of X gĕi Y dàilái xìngfú (‘X brings happiness to Y’) also suggests that the realization of xìngfú depends on others’ actions. Thus, xìngfú implies mutuality and certain expectations of what the other party does for one. Only when those expectations are met can the experiencer be described as truly being in the state of xìngfú. So far it has become clear that the meaning of xìngfú is very different from that of happiness/happy. English does not appear to have words matching xìngfú in meaning, either. This does not mean that the exact and nuanced meaning of xìngfú cannot be made accessible to people who are unfamiliar with the concept. By using the culture-independent Natural Semantic Metalanguage to elucidate the typical thought scenario that gives rise to the emotional state of xìngfú, one can not only gain a deep and detailed insight into its culture-specific meaning, but also do so from a perspective that stays as close as possible to that of a native. The full meaning of xìngfú can be spelled out as follows: [C] Semantic explication of xìngfú (‘the belief that one is cared for and loved’) a. it can be like this:   someone feels something very good for some time because this someone thinks like this at this time: b.   “I know that I can be with someone at many times   I feel something very good when I am with this someone   I feel something very good when I think about this someone c.   at the same time, I know that it is like this:   this someone feels something very good towards me   this someone often thinks about me   this someone wants to do good things for me d.   I want it to be like this” e.   when this someone thinks like this, this someone feels something very good for some time   like people feel at many times when they think like this f.   it is very good for this someone if it is like this



The meaning of “happiness” (xìngfú) and “emotional pain” (tòngkŭ) in Chinese

Xìngfú represents a state of inner security accompanied by the experiencer’s thought that he or she is cared for and loved by the ones they are attached to. Component (a) attempts to capture the idea that xìngfú describes subjective feeling linked with a certain state of mind. The components in (a) and (e) set up the standard outer frame of what is known in NSM emotion research as a prototypical cognitive scenario, where a script-like sequence of thoughts that typically go with and identify the named feeling is encased and specified. In the case of xìngfú, the series of thoughts represented in components (b-d) identify the associated feeling named as xìngfú and distinguish it from other named feelings. The actual thoughts are presented in three bundles. The first two bundles are signaled by ‘I know’ in the first components of (b) and (c), showing that xìngfú encompasses certain beliefs and high consciousness. The first bundle, in (b), shows ‘my’ feelings towards the other party. It essentially tries to capture a sense of trust and deep attachment, which, in effect, forms the very basis from which ‘my’ belief in and expectations of the other party derive. ‘My belief and expectations’ are spelled out in the components in (c), which form the second bundle. These two bundles of components are presented in an almost symmetrical way, so as to reflect the relational and mutual dimensions of the meaning encoded in xìngfú. The only asymmetrical element is the one that describes ‘my’ belief that the other party wants to ‘do good things for me’ in the final line of (c). As mentioned earlier, xìngfú is relational in nature and its realization relies not on one’s own volition but on what the other party does. Thus, this “caring” element is crucial to the overall semantic picture of xìngfú. The third bundle comprises one component (d) only: ‘I want it to be like this’. Component (e) spells out the experiencer’s resulting ‘very good feeling’, adding the element of typicality: ‘like people feel at many times when they link like this’. The final component (f) indicates that xìngfú is a highly cherished value for many people, and can be regarded as an ideal. This still leaves open the question of whether, in the view of Chinese speakers, xìngfú is attainable, a topic to be discussed in the next section. 3.3 Xìngfú and the Chinese idea of love The caring element, which figures prominently in the meaning of xìngfú, is also crucial to our understanding of the Chinese idea of love, which places emphasis on actions and deeds over words (e.g. Ye 2004; Caldwell-Harris et al. 2013). This applies equally to familial and romantic love. Although the example sentences presented here are often about the care children receive from their parents, many corpus examples, such as (7) above, show that, in the eyes of many parents, their xìngfú is realized and sustained by the caring deeds performed by their children.

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This is consistent with the Chinese core value of xiào, known amongst students of Chinese psychology as ‘filial piety’. The core meaning of xìngfú is also consistent with Chinese cultural ethos and value orientations. The relational meaning encoded in the term xìngfú is further evidenced in the word’s collocational behaviour. For example, one can collocate xìngfú with guānxī (relationship), as in the title of a recent TV series Xìngfú de póxī guānxī 幸福的 婆媳关系 (‘The happy relationship between a mother and her daughter-in-law’). It is also common to use xìngfú to describe fūqī guānxī 夫妻关系 (‘husband-wife relationship’). The almost synonymous word kuàilè, on the other hand, can never collocate with guānxī (‘relationship’). Similarly, while one can say xìngfú méimăn de hūnyīn (‘xìngfú perfect marriage’), kuàilè is unacceptable here. Furthermore, the word xìngfú is typically collocated with jiātíng (‘family’), evoking in the mind of a Chinese speaker an image of a perfect family (often an extended one), where members care for each other. The ‘familial love’ can almost be taken as the default meaning of xìngfú. It is this relational and deeply earthly characteristic of xìngfú that renders the term inapplicable to single, i.e. unmarried, men or women. Nor can the term be used to describe nuns or monks, who are generally thought of by Chinese speakers as having already transcended, and being detached from, the affairs of this world.10 The very idea of “attachment” is at odds with the fundamental principles of Buddhism. It is perhaps not too difficult to appreciate that Chinese xìngfú is almost synonymous with ‘love’ in many contexts, particularly when referring to the life goal of single men and women, who often feel that something important is lacking in their lives. 3.4 Is xìngfú attainable? The other-dependent nature of xìngfú bestows upon the term a passive and fatalistic touch. After all, one can desire and search for xìngfú, but whether one finds it or not often lies beyond one’s individual volition and is subject to external forces, such as fú ‘luck/good fortune/beatitude’, yuán ‘predestined relationship’, or mìng ‘fate’. Chinese speakers know too well that when xìngfú lái qiāomén, ‘when xìngfú

10.  Bok (2010) writes in her book on happiness: “One of the monks, Matthieu Ricard, who has worked with Davidson throughout, has been hailed by enthusiastic observers as one of the happiest persons on earth. Owen Flanagan, a philosopher in the forefront of efforts to bridge the gap between Western and Eastern philosophy and social and natural scientists, goes so far as to write that if asked whether Ricard was the happiest person ever to exist, he would say ‘Yes’.” If we were to replace the English word happiness with the Chinese word xìngfú, it would create a comic effect in this context.



The meaning of “happiness” (xìngfú) and “emotional pain” (tòngkŭ) in Chinese

knocks on the door’,11 one should zhuāzhù ‘catch/seize’ or băwò ‘grasp’ it, but it may not last forever, as is reflected in the following example (where the speaker accepts that her xìngfú has already been ‘spent’). (10) 我以为这个辈子我会永远和他在一起, 永远如此幸福, 却不料我是把这 一辈子 的幸福都预支了. 他终于还是离开了我.  (LCMC2) I thought that I would spend the rest of my life with him and enjoy happiness (xìngfú) forever. I did not expect that I had already spent my happiness (xìngfú) in advance. He nonetheless left me.

Indeed, this fatalistic outlook of xìngfú contrasts with the very active idea of the ‘pursuit of happiness’ (see Goddard & Wierzbicka 2014: 118–119), particularly with the implication of individual freedom embedded in the meaning of happiness, which is crystallized in the component ‘I can do many things as I want.’ Because the idea of xìngfú is closely tied to marriage and family, for many people, àiqíng (‘romantic love’) becomes a gateway to it and it is often in this context that xìngfú and the search for it are talked about. 3.5 Results of “happiness” research seen through the lens of the semantics of xìngfú Seen through the prism of Chinese xìngfú, some of the research results on Chinese “happiness” suddenly make a lot of sense. For example, Diener et al’s (1995) SWB study shows that family was rated quite highly by Chinese informants as a contributing factor of happiness. In fact, domains such as education and housing in which a student’s personal responsibility appear to be relatively small, are rated low. Finally, a fate interpretation (things might get bad if I say they are too good) is called into question by the fact that domains such as the family are rated quite highly.  (Diener et al. 1995)

In view of the meaning of xìngfú, as explicated above, one may also question whether the researchers cited below failed to consider some important factors in explaining trends in life satisfaction among Chinese people. Particularly, in recent times, economic change and massive internal migration have put enormous strain on the lives of Chinese families and on interpersonal relationships:

11.  Chinese speakers often describe xìngfú in non-volitional terms, such as dàolái ‘arrives’ and the one mentioned here. Intriguingly, the expression xìngfú lá qiāomén ‘when xìngfú knocks on the door’, the title of a recent popular Chinese TV series, was also the term used in the Chinese title given to the 2006 American film The Pursuit of Happyness.

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Moreover, there is more to life satisfaction than material goods. Other factors include home life and the need for a secure job to support it, health, friends and relatives, and the life. It is possible that the lack of a marked uptrend in overall life satisfaction in Chinese might reflect an adverse impact on life satisfaction of changes in such factors as these, as has been true of the transition experience of East Germany, for which data on such circumstances are available. (Easterlin et al. 2012)

Of course, it would be unrealistic to expect that semantic analysis can predict all research findings, but the point illustrated here is that knowing the meaning of the concepts in terms of which informants habitually think about the questions posed to them by researchers is of critical importance for a meaningful and accurate interpretation of the data. 4. Tòngkŭ (‘mental pain/suffering/anguish’): the opposite of xìngfú The Xinhua Dictionary of Opposites (Zhang and Zhang 2010: 731–732) lists tòngkŭ and xìngfú as opposites. This has been further confirmed by my native Chinese informants. The following textual examples further illustrate how this pair of opposites often appears in contrastive contexts. (11) 你还是活的吗?你还能爱吗?你还会为了爱而痛苦而幸福吗?不行.  (Shi 2000: 46) Are you still alive? Are you still capable of loving? Can you still be hurt (tòngkŭ) or made happy (xìngfú) by love? No. (12) 是的是的, 一时没有了痛苦的衬照便一时没有了幸福感.  (Shi, 2000: 49) Yes, and yes, without the contrast of suffering (tòngkŭ), one does not have a sense of happiness (xìngfú). (13) 我一直觉得受过伤害的人比一直顺利的人更懂得贡献, 因为他们从痛苦 中走出来, 他们曾经获得别人的帮助, 所以他们更明白应该怎样帮助别 人, 我觉得我们可以比那些幸福的人做得更好.  (An 1998: 212) I always feel that, compared with those that have had it easy, those who have been hurt know better how to contribute. Because they came out of anguish (tòngkŭ) and had the help of others, they know better how to help others. I think we can do better than those who are happy (xìngfú).

An appreciation of the meaning of tòngkŭ (‘mental pain/suffering’) can perhaps provide a glimpse of how certain human experiences are conceptualized and categorized as contrastive by Chinese speakers.



The meaning of “happiness” (xìngfú) and “emotional pain” (tòngkŭ) in Chinese

4.1 The meaning of tòngkŭ Tòngkŭ refers to intense emotional suffering, as clearly reflected in the following examples: (13) 或许他们比我少着梦想所以也比我少着痛苦? (Shi 200: 34) Perhaps it is like this: they have fewer dreams therefore they feel less pain and anguish (tòngkŭ)? (14) 只是在她猝然去世之后, 我才有余暇设想. 当我不在家里的那些漫长的 时间, 她是怎样心神不定坐卧难宁, 兼着痛苦与惊恐与一个母亲最低限 度的祈求.  (Shi 2000: 12) It was only after her sudden death that I had time to reflect. How she would have been so agitated by my long absences from home, filled with anguish (tòngkŭ) and fear and the basic desire for the safety of her child. (15) 那段时间我痛苦极了, 当我与你面对面平静交谈时, 当我离你很远却用 心与你沟通时, 当万籁寂静的夜里你反复出现在我的梦中时, 我真不知 道是幸福多还是痛苦多?爱一个人太不容易了!你说我胆子大敢对你表 白, 可你知道当时我的路只有一条, 在单恋中痛苦下去和被别人拒绝结 局是一样的, 后者更简洁些, 能更快地结束一个故事, 我已被折磨得受不 了了!  (An 1998: 10) I was in an anguished state (tòngkŭ) during that time. When we conversed calmly facing each other, when I used my heart to communicate with you while I was far away, when you appeared in my dreams in the peaceful night, I don’t know whether there was more happiness (xìngfú) or suffering (tòngkŭ) for me? It’s not easy to be in love with someone! You said that I was brave to let you know my feelings, but did you know that I only had one choice? Letting my pain (tòngkŭ) continue over unrequited love is no different from being rejected by others, the latter being simpler and quicker. I can’t bear the emotional torture anymore! (16) 我很痛苦 , 我的成绩一落千丈. 我没有考上大学, 他当然也没有娶我.  (CCL) I was distressed (tòngkŭ). My results were terrible. I was not admitted to university, and he, of course, did not marry me.

One is also tempted to think that tòngkŭ could refer to physical pain when reading the following example: (17) 整整一上午, 鼻子里被插上了氧气管, 随着药液一滴滴地进入身体, 头开 始眩晕, 浑身酸软无力, 心快跳出来一样. 闭上眼, 一动也不敢动, 什么都 不愿想, 但能够清醒地感受到痛苦.  (Zhang 1998: 19–20)

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Oxygen tubes were put into my nose throughout the morning. With each drop entering my body, I felt dizzy and weak all over. I felt that my heart almost jumped out. I closed my eyes, and did not make one move. I didn’t want to think about anything, but could clearly feel the pain and anguish (tòngkŭ).

Upon close examination, especially if we replace the term tòngkŭ in the above sentence with another term téngtòng, which refers to physical pain only without any reference to thought, it becomes immediately clear that the state or feeling of tòngkŭ must be based on certain thoughts. Thus, although in the following example the term téngtòng (‘physical pain/suffering’) can be replaced by tòngkŭ (‘mental suffering’), the intended meanings is different. (18) 我被它们统治着、折磨着, 身受其害, 痛不欲生着, 疼痛几乎是我生活的 主题, 我不得不想出各种方法来对付它, … (Zhang 1998: 189) I was at the mercy of the medicines and in anguish. My body was injured and I did not want to live any more. Pain (téngtòng) had almost become the theme of my life. I had no other choice but to find ways to deal with it.

Thus, it is clear that tòngkŭ always includes a reference to thought. In its prototype, however, the feeling is rooted in and analogous to bodily feeling. The following example certainly implies that the experiencer was suffering physical pain. However, the use of the term tòngkŭ (and also jiān’áo, which implies a long mental ordeal; see Ye 2002) stresses the mental suffering. (19) 临终前在痛苦的煎熬中他已进入时断时续的昏迷中.  (CCL) Before his death, in an anguished (tòngkŭ) state, he slipped in and out of a coma.

A full explication of tòngkŭ follows: [D] Semantic explication for tòngkŭ (‘mental pain/suffering/anguish’)

a. it can be like this:   someone feels something very bad for some time because this someone thinks like this at this time: b.   “something very bad is happening to me   I don’t want it   I very much don’t want it   I want to do something because of this   at the same time I don’t know what I can do   I can’t not think about this all the time” c.   when this someone thinks like this, this someone feels something very bad for some time like someone can feel at many times when something very bad is happening   in this someone’s body d.  this someone can’t not feel like this when this someone thinks like this



The meaning of “happiness” (xìngfú) and “emotional pain” (tòngkŭ) in Chinese

Tòngkŭ (‘emotional pain’) and xìngfú (‘happiness’) share a similar conceptual frame, as reflected in the first and last components. The main difference in the overall conceptual structure is that tòngkŭ has bodily feeling as its conceptual anchor, as per the second part of (c). Like xìngfú, tòngkŭ typically denotes an intense emotional state extended in time, reflected in the ‘feel something very bad for some time’ segment in the first line of (c). The prototypical thoughts of tòngkŭ, given in (b), describe a violent mental struggle between the outright, total rejection of an adverse concurrent event that is deeply personal, the strong desire for action, and the inability on the part of the experiencer to find a solution to change the situation. Yet, the experiencer does not give up, even if there may not be any remote ray of hope. He or she may be totally consumed by the situation and by the accompanying thoughts and feelings. In its protest against the current situation (‘I don’t want it, I very much don’t want it’), tòngkŭ is closer in meaning to the English distress. The very active state of mind of tòngkŭ is far from an attitude of acceptance and resignation, differing strongly in this respect from English sadness and some Chinese sadness-like emotions (see Ye 2001); thus, a component like ‘I can’t think: I can do something’ is not posited in the explication of tòngkŭ. Typical collocations, such as tòngkŭ de juézé (‘painful decision’), all point to an active state of mind on the part of the experiencer. Of the many perceived ‘very bad’ things that happen to the experiencer, not surprisingly, relationship difficulties figure prominently in texts (see e.g. example (15)). However, it is also clear from the above examples that there can be many other causes of tòngkŭ. Thus, a general component ‘something very bad is happening to me’ is included in the first line of (b). One, then, is left with the question of why tòngkŭ and xìngfú are construed as opposites by Chinese speakers. Interestingly, although many of my informants named tòngkŭ as the opposite of xìngfú without hesitation, they could not explain why it is so, because they did not feel the two terms were symmetrically opposed to each other in meaning. Yet, the informants were all quick to point out that both terms represent absolute states, the opposite poles of the extreme states one can find oneself in.12 Perhaps, in the emotional sphere, one may not always be able to find neatly symmetrical opposites. Perhaps what are viewed as emotional opposites in a language reflect what its speakers regard as a salient contrast of human experience.

12.  The intensity is reflected in the fact that both terms can only take maximizing but not minimizing qualifiers in Chinese. It is also reflected in the distinctive facial expressions associated with both terms. The concept of tòngkŭ is closely related to, though distinct from, kŭ (‘mental anguish’) (see Ye 2013).

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5. Concluding remarks Goddard and Wierzbicka (2014: 102) write: “the English word happiness is not an adequate tool for exploring themes such as the human desire for a good life.” This study of the meanings of the central ‘happiness’ concept and its opposite in contemporary Chinese lends support to the view that the ideas embodied in the English words happiness and pain are not universal. The study also shows that the “Chinese notion of happiness” (xìngfú) to a large extent implies the “Chinese idea of love” (it is not overtly shown; it is subtle, reflected above all in loving and caring deeds) and the place of relationships in the human ideal. Chinese “happiness” (xìngfú) does not imply the kind of individual freedom and effort envisaged in the English happiness concept. The relational character of the Chinese “happiness” (xìngfú) is consonant with the general Chinese cultural ethos, which is family oriented and relational (Wilson 1981; Ho 1993; Sun 2008; Hwang 2012; see also Ames 2011). The unpacking of the meaning of the word reveals the invisible hand of culture. The findings in this study highlight not only the importance of the role of language and metalanguage in cross-linguistic and cross-cultural study, but also the role of culture in emotion study. Research cannot afford to overlook the cultural soil where local ideas and concepts grow. The Chinese view of life is undeniably shaped by the culture and dominant cultural concerns of Chinese speakers. 6. Directions for future research Around the time of Chinese National Day (1 October) in 2012, the CCTV news bulletin, which is the most watched program in Mainland China, broadcast a series of special programs in which reporters asked ordinary Chinese people, chosen at random, in China and abroad, the question ‘Nĭ xìngfú ma?’ (‘Are you happy?’). It aroused heated discussion in all forms of media in Mainland China. To ask people such a question was unprecedented. To quote from an article posted on the New Yorker News Desk (Fan 2012), “more than half of the people approached were suspicious or confused, obviously unaccustomed to this requisitioning of an honest opinion.” Perhaps the most talked-about case was that of a grandfather, whose answer, read in English, was “my last name is not Fu” (xìngfú and xìng Fu, meaning ‘called Fu,’ sound similar). To quote the New Yorker article again, “apparently, the



The meaning of “happiness” (xìngfú) and “emotional pain” (tòngkŭ) in Chinese

elderly gentleman thought the happiness query so unlikely that he immediately chose to interpret the question as [being about his surname].”13 Comical answers aside, the episode does alert us to the fact that, by asking publicly the question ‘Nĭ xìngfú ma?,’ we may be introducing a new way of talking about emotions, mental states, and personal existence. This highlights the need for researchers to look into the “emotional scripts” (e.g. Markus and Kitayama 1994; Wierzbicka 1994, 2013; Ye 2006b) surrounding the expression of “happiness” in each culture. If Chinese xìngfú is such a relational concept, is it appropriate at all to ask questions about it? Can one simply expect people to give an honest answer? When watching each episode on CCTV, I was struck by how many middle-aged women simply averted their gaze and avoided the question. Understandably, because of the strong relational connotation contained in the concept, it is possible that xìngfú is a topic talked about more among Chinese women, and many of them may see it as an ultimate goal in life. One can’t but notice that the Leiden Weibo Corpus showed that more women than men actually use social media, and the high frequency of the word could partially be explained by this. How the Chinese xìngfú concept correlates with gender is certainly one of the topics that deserve further attention. Diener et al. (1995) reported that: Subjective well-being seems less important and salient to the Chinese students than to those in the other nations. This result is consistent with the findings of Shao (1992) who found a large number of Chinese women who did not respond to the life satisfaction question. (Diener et al. 1995: 28)

Clearly, something to do with gender is going on here. Further research along gender lines will allow us to solve this puzzle.

References American Academy of Arts and Sciences. (2004). On happines. Daedalus, 133(2), 5–87. Ames, R. T. (2011). Confucian role ethics. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press. An, D. (Ed.). (1998). Juéduì yĭnsī: dāngdài zhōngguórén qínggăn kŏshù shílù [Absolute privacy: oral records of contemporary Chinese emotions]. Beijing: The New World Publishing House.

13.  The same New Yorker article (Fan 2012) also mentions that a popular explanation for unhappiness ran along the lines of “ ‘no house, no car. What is there to be happy about’…many Chinese now seem to find property a crucial ingredient in the recipe for happiness.” For many young people in China, having no house or car almost means no financial conditions for tying the knot.

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Easterlin, R. A., Morgan, R., Switek, M., & Wang, F. (2012). China’s life satisfaction, 1990-2012. PNAS, 109(25), 9775–9780. ​doi: 10.1073/pnas.1205672109 Fan, J. (Producer). (2012, 10 October, 2012). Are the Chinese happy?. Retrieved from http:// www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/10/are-the-chinese-happy.html?printa ble=true¤tPage=all. Geertz, C. (1976). From the native’s point of view. In K. H. Basso & H. Selby (Eds.), Meaning in anthropology (pp. 221–237). Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Goddard, C., & Wierzbicka, A. (2014). Words and meanings: Lexical semantics across domains, languages, and cultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goddard, C., & Wierzbicka, A. (Eds.). (1994). Semantic and lexical universals—Theory and empirical findings. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ​doi: 10.1075/slcs.25 Goddard, C., & Wierzbicka, A. (Eds.). (2002). Meaning and universal grammar—Theory and empirical findings. 2 Vols. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Goodard, C., & Ye, Z. (This volume). Exploring concepts of “happiness and “pain” across languages and cultures. Graham, C. (2011). The pursuit of happiness: An economy of well-being with a new preface. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institute Press. Helliwell, J., Layard, R., & Sachs, J. (2012). World happiness report. New York: The Earth Institute. Ho, D. Y. F. (1993). Relational orientation in Asian social psychology. In U. Kim & J. W. Berry (Eds.), Indigenous psychologies: Research and experience in cultural context (pp. 240–256). Newbury Park: Sage. Hwang, K. K. (2012). Foundations of Chinese psychology: Confucian social relations. NY: Springer ​ doi: 10.1007/978-1-4614-1439-1

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The meaning of “happiness” (xìngfú) and “emotional pain” (tòngkŭ) in Chinese

Lutz, C. (1995). Need, nurturance, and the emotions on a Pacific Atoll. In J. Marks & R T. Ames (Eds.), Emotions in Asian thought: A dialogue in comparative philosophy (pp. 235–252). Albany, N. Y.: State university of New York Press. Malmkjær, K. (2011). Translation universals. In K. Malmkjær & K. Windle (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of translation studies (pp. 83–93). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Markus, H. R., & Kitayama, S. (1994). The cultural construction of self and emotion: Implication for social behavior. In S. Kitayama & H. R. Markus (Eds.), Emotion and culture: Empirical studies of mutual influence (pp. 89–132). Washington, D.C.: American psychological association. ​doi: 10.1037/10152-003 McEnery, T., & Xiao, R. (2004). The Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese (LCMC). From Lancaster University (Linguistics Department). http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/projects/ corpus/LCMC/default.htm PKU, Centre for Chinese Linguistics. (2009). CCL Corpus. Available from Centre for Chinese Linguistics, PKU Retrieved December 28, 2013 http://ccl.pku.edu.cn:8080/ccl_corpus/ Shao, L. (1993). Multilanguage comparability of life satisfaction and happiness measures in Mainland Chinese and American students. MA thesis. University of Illinois, UrbanaChampaign. Shi, T. (2000). Zhōnghuá sànwén zhēncángbĕn - Shĭ Tiĕshēng juàn [A treasure of Chinese essays - works by Shi Tiesheng]. Beijing: Renmin Literature Publishing House. Sun, C. T-L. (2008). Themes in Chinese psychology. Singapore: Cengage Learning.  .

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Tao, H., & Xiao, R. (2012). The UCLA Chinese Corpus. 2nd Edition. http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/ fass/projects/corpus/UCLA/ van Esch, D. (2012). Leiden weibo corpus. http://lwc.daanvanesch.nl Wierzbicka, A. (1994). Emotion, language, and ‘cultural scripts’. In S. Kitayama & H. R. Markus (Eds.), Emotion and culture: Empirical studies of mutual influence (pp. 130–196). Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association. Wierzbicka, A. (1999). Emotions across languages and cultures: Diversity and universals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ​doi: 10.1017/CBO9780511521256 Wierzbicka, A. (2004). ‘Happiness’ in cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective. Daedalus, 133(2), 34–43. ​doi: 10.1162/001152604323049370 Wierzbicka, A. (2011). What’s wrong with “happiness studies”. The cultural semantics of happiness, bonheur, Glück and Sčast’e’. In I.M. Boguslavskij, L.L. Iomdin, and L.P. Krysin (Ed.), Slovo i Jazyk (pp. 155–171). Moscow: Jazyki slavjanskoj Kultury. Wierzbicka, A. (2013). Imprisoned in English: The hazards of English as a default language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ​doi: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199321490.001.0001 Wilson, R. W. (1981). Moral behavior in Chinese society: A theoretical perspective. In R. W. Wilson, S. L. Greenblatt & A. Auerbacher (Eds.), Moral behavior in Chinese society (pp. 1–20). NY: Paeger. Ye, Z. (2001). An inquiry into ‘sadness’ in Chinese. In J. Harkins & A. Wierzbicka (Eds.), Emotion in a cross-linguistic perspective (pp. 359–404). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Ye, Z. (2002). Different modes of describing emotions in Chinese: Bodily changes, sensations, and bodily images. Pragmatics & Cognition, 10(1/2), 307–339. ​doi: 10.1075/pc.10.1-2.13ye Ye, Z. (2004). La double vie de Veronica: reflections on my life as a Chinese migrant in Australia. Life Writing, 1(1), 133–146. ​doi: 10.1080/10408340308518247

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Japanese interpretations of “pain” and the use of psychomimes Yuko Asano-Cavanagh Curtin University

This chapter examines six Japanese psychomimes — zuki-zuki, kiri-kiri, shikushiku, chiku-chiku, hiri-hiri, and gan-gan — that express subtle differences in states or sensations regarding “pain”. It is generally recognized, however, that many languages lack words with the same meanings as these Japanese psychomimes and that their meanings are difficult to capture precisely. The definitions in Japanese-English dictionaries, for example, are not sufficient to explain the exact meanings and there is also the problem that each Japanese expression can correspond to several English verbs. This study applies the framework of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach to explicate the meaning of the six Japanese psychomimes. It makes reference to a corpus of naturally-occurring examples compiled from publicly available sources from physicians, patients, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies. The analysis indicates that each psychomime conveys a vivid metaphorical meaning. The quality of the pain is suggested by reference to an imagined scenario of something moving inside a part of the body or touching part of the body. This imagined ‘something’ can be understood as something ‘sharp’ or as something similar to ‘fire’ or to ‘metal’. The use of psychomimes is an effective and efficient way for expressing and understanding “pain” in Japanese. Keywords: pain, Japanese, psychomimes, Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM)

As observed by many scholars (e.g., Martin 1975; Shibatani 1990), sound-symbolic (mimetic) expressions are one of the most outstanding — and indeed, indispensable — features of the Japanese lexicon. There are more than 1600 of them (Asano 1978; Kakehi et al. 1996; Noma 1998; Ivanova 2006), used by people of all ages in describing subtle differences between various sounds, actions, or feelings. In Japanese linguistics, sound-symbolic (mimetic) words are often categorized into three groups: giseigo (phonomimes) — words that imitate human and animal voices, e.g., wan-wan ‘bow-wow’; gitaigo (phenomimes) — words that depict doi 10.1075/bct.84.05asa 2016 © John Benjamins Publishing Company

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states, conditions, or manners of the external world, e.g., kossori ‘stealthily’; and gijougo (psychomimes) — words that symbolise mental conditions or sensations, e.g., zuki-zuki ‘throbbingly’ (Shibatani 1990: 154). This study is concerned only with psychomines for expressing or describing “pain”. When Japanese speakers describe pain, the use of psychomimes becomes almost essential. As Fabrega and Tyma (1976) point out, while in English unpleasant physical feelings can be expressed by several different words, such as pain, ache, sore and hurt, Japanese has only two primary pain terms: itai ‘painful’ and itamu ‘feel pain’. Although one may use intensifiers or adverbs such as hidoku ‘terribly’, hageshiku ‘intensely’, tsuyoku ‘powerfully’, or nantonaku ‘vaguely’, the use of mimetic words plays a much more crucial role. Medical professionals often rely on the patients’ use of psychomimes during consultations. For instance, Dr. Taku Funakoshi, a medical doctor based at Chiba University Hospital, writes the following (Recruit Co. Ltd. 2010): We don’t make diagnosis simply based on the expressions which the patient used. However, the psychomimes actually help us in specifying the symptoms or identifying where the pain is located. Therefore, we advise patients to describe exactly how they feel, without worrying about whether they would be understood or not.

In addition, psychomimes are often used in advertisements for pharmaceutical companies, and websites for medical clinics or hospitals. This suggests that understanding psychomimes is of primary importance to understanding “pain talk” in Japanese. From an indigenous Japanese point of view, the sound-symbolic quality of psychomimes is self-evident, in the sense that speakers feel that there is a direct resemblance relationship between the sound of the word and the meaning it expresses (Kobayashi 1965; National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics 1984; Garrigues 1995; Kita 1997, 2001; Hamano 1998; Kadooka 2001; Noma 2001; Tamori 2001; Baba 2003; Ivanova 2006; Lu 2006; Pantucheva 2006; Ikegami and Zlatev 2007; Iwasaki et al 2007). It is much more difficult, however, to identify how this works in detail1 and this will not be attempted in the present study. We 1.  Some claims in the literature are (i) that reduplication conveys repetitious or iterative sounds or actions (Garrigues 1995; Kadooka 2002), (ii) that narrow, high vowels, such as in [u], [i], and [e], are associated with “smallness” while open, low vowels, such as [a] or [o], are associated with “largeness” (Baba 2003: 1867), (iii) that voicing is associated with “bulkiness, heaviness, ponderousness, viscosity, slowness, loudness or large movement” (Garrigues 1995: 378), and (iv) that repetition of identical sounds creates a feeling of harmony and regularity, whereas contrasting sounds convey lack of harmony, unbalance, disorderliness and intensity (Ivanova 2006: 113). Even if these correlations are valid, they are not sufficient to fully account for the sound associations that are perceived by Japanese speakers. Furthermore, there is some evidence to suggest sound-meaning associations are rather language-specific (Iwasaki et al 2007; Iwasaki et al 2007).



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focus instead on the meanings of the words in question. Perhaps not surprisingly, Japanese mimetic expressions are considered the most difficult hurdle for translators and learners of Japanese (Clancy and Slobin 1986; Atouda and Hoshino 1989; Ogoshi 1989; Otani 1989; Tamamura 1989; Flyxe 2002; Iwasaki et al 2007; Inose 2008; Toratani 2009). As Hasada (2001: 218) observes, ordinary bilingual dictionaries provide only sketchy definitions and often give the same English gloss for more than one psychomime without explaining the differences (cf. Uchida et al 2012). For instance, one source (Yamaguchi 2003: 211) defines shiku-shiku as follows: (1)

Karada no oku ga nibuku sasu youni body GEN inside SUB dully pierce/stab/prick as.if taezu itamu yousu. continuously hurt way ‘(lit.) The way one feels continuous pain as if something pierces (stabs, pricks, sticks, thorns, stings, thrusts, or bites) the inner part of the body dully.’

The Japanese verb sasu, used in this definition, can be translated into eight English words: pierce, stab, prick, stick, thorn, sting, thrust, or bite. In addition, it is not clear what nibuku sasu ‘pierce (or stab) dully’ really means: the adverb nibuku ‘dully’ seems out of place in combination with actions such as stabbing and piercing. This study employs the NSM method (Wierzbicka 1999, 2006, 2010: Goddard and Wierzbicka 2002, 2014; Peeters 2006; Goddard 2008, 2011, 2012; cf. Goddard and Ye, this volume) to explicate the meanings conveyed by psychomimes.2 The choice of the six psychomimes was guided, firstly, by Fabrega and Tyma (1976), who identified chiku-chiku, hiri-hiri, zuki-zuki and kiri-kiri as typical examples of “pain” psychomimes, and, secondly, by Funakoshi (Recruit Co. Ltd. 2010), who states that two additional words, shiku-shiku and gan-gan, are frequently used among patients and health professionals.3 The analysis relies on a purpose-built corpus of publicly available naturally-occurring examples (see Appendix) drawn from hospital and health clinic information, pharmaceutical advertisements, and question-and-answer conversations between patients and medical professionals.

2.  See also Hasada (1998, 2001, 2002, 2008) and Asano-Cavanagh (2009, 2010, 2011). 3.  There are two other fairly common psychomimes not examined in this chapter. Jiku-jiku represents pain which one feels especially on the skin, as if liquid exudes on the surface of the affected area (Atouda and Hoshino 1993). Piri-piri is a sharp feeling of pain as if one has received an electric shock (Fukuda 2003).

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1. Further background on psychomimes The six Japanese psychomimes have a number of common properties. First, the psychomimes are often combined with a generic verb suru ‘do’, which in this context substitutes for the verb itamu ‘feel pain’. For instance, zuki-zuki suru means that one experiences zuki-zuki pain. Second, it is a well-known fact that in Japanese one cannot describe someone else’s inner feelings directly unless the emotional expression is embedded in the form of reportive speech (Teramura 1984). Baba (2003) points out that the psychomimes are subject to the same constraint.4 To see how this works, consider first (2), which displays subject ellipsis. This is a common feature of Japanese and, generally speaking, the identity of the unspecified subject can be understood to be any contextually relevant referent. With psychomime predications, however, as with emotion predicates, the only available interpretation is a first-person subject. (2) Atama ga gan-gan suru. head NOM gan-gan do ‘My head does gan-gan (i.e. I have a pounding headache).’

Furthermore, in order to use an explicit second or third person noun-phrase as subject, a hearsay expression, such as I heard or he/she says, must be attached, as shown in (3a) and (3b). (3) a. * Kare wa atama ga gan-gan suru. he top head nom gan-gan do ‘His head does gan-gan.’ b. Kare wa atama ga gan-gan suru souda. he top head nom gan-gan do he.says ‘He says his head does gan-gan (i.e. he has a pounding headache).’

These observations indicate that psychomimes, like emotion expressions, involve an ‘I feel …’ component; specifically, for the “pain” psychomines ‘I feel something bad in one part of my body’. Psychomimes differ from other sound-symbolic words, such as phenomimes, because psychomimes only express the speaker’s inner feelings or physical states at the time of utterance. Osawa (2006) illustrates this point by observing that psychomimes are often used in exclamatory sentences, while phenomimes cannot be so used. For example, a psychomime expression like chiku-chiku suru (with the verb 4.  Baba (2003) observes that psychomimes were found to be most significantly related to high emotive intensity, as they are exclusively used in the self-role-play, and not in a reportive form with indirect description.



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suru ‘do’ uninflected) is compatible with an interjection in an exclamatory sentence, such as (4), whereas a phenomime like kuyo-kuyo ‘dwell on’ cannot be used in this way, as shown in (5a); rather, the phenomime expression needs to be used with the imperfective present tense, as in (5b).5 This suggests that the component ‘now’ is embedded in the meaning of the psychomine. (4) A, senaka ga chiku-chiku suru! (psychomime) oh back NOM chiku-chiku do ‘Oh, I feel chiku-chiku on my back!’ (5) a. ? A, mata kuyo-kuyo suru! (phenomime) oh again dwell.on do ‘Oh, I dwell on the past again!’ b. A, mata kuyo-kuyo shi-tei-ru! oh again dwell.on do-IMPF-PRES ‘Oh, I am dwelling on the past again!’

From an intuitive point of view, it is obvious that someone who utters a psychomime recognises that the pain is caused by internal or external damage. Thus the psychomimes involve the meaning of ‘I think like this now: something bad is happening in one part of my body’. As noted by Uchida et al (2012), the meaning of psychomimes cannot be easily expressed by means of purely descriptive paraphrase. By using the psychomimes, the speaker is trying to characterise a feeling by reference to an image of some kind, but an image that requires an imaginative leap by the addressee. I would like to propose that the key component has the following form: people can know how I feel if they can think like this for a short time: it is like this: [followed by a scenario, specific to the individual psychomime]

In other words, the speaker offers the addressee a way to imagine a similar sensation, if the addressee is willing to, as it were, “suspend reality” for a short time and imagine a scenario in which, for example, something sharp is moving inside one’s body, or repeatedly pricking one’s skin, or the like. As we see shortly, the events in these imaginary scenarios are iterative and/or durative in nature, consistent with the tendency across reduplicated mimetics generally (Garrigues 1995). Thus, the scenarios not only involve some imagined events inside or involving one’s body, 5.  As pointed out by many scholars (e.g., Kuno 1973; Kindaichi 1976), Japanese stative verbals such as samui ‘to be cold’, akai ‘to be red’, tai ‘to want’, or sukida ‘to be fond of ’ all represent states and they refer to present time. On the other hand, non-stative verbals, such as kuru ‘to come’, yomu ‘to read’, or suru ‘to do’, represent actions, and they usually refer to future time, unless they represent habitual actions. For instance (Kuno 1973: 136): John ga kuru [John nom come] ‘John is coming (John will come).

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but these events are characterised as happening either ‘at many times’ (i.e. repeatedly) and ‘for some time’. With this by way of introduction, explications for each psychomime will now be presented in turn, illustrated by textual examples. 2. Semantic analysis of individual psychomimes

Analysis of zuki-zuki Dr. Funakoshi at Chiba University Hospital says that “the most frequently used psychomime among patients is zuki-zuki. Zuki-zuki is used for various body parts, describing pulsating or beating pain” (Recruit Co. Ltd. 2010). As he observes, it is also the most versatile expression for describing pain, since it can be used about any part of the body from head to toe. The following examples refer to the head and the chest (Juzen Chiropractic Health Care Clinic 2012; Rokkan-shinkeitsuu Jiten 2012). Example (6) is from an advertisement of a chiropractic health clinic. Example (7) is from an online dictionary for intercostal neuralgia. (6)

Zutsuu. Koutoubu zuki-zuki itamu, headache back zuki-zuki hurt koutoubu-zutsuu no gen’in back.headache gen cause ‘Headache. The back of my head feels zuki-zuki pain. It is the cause of my headache (at the back of my head).’

(7)

Kinou made nantomo nakat-ta noni, yesterday until anything neg-past although nandaka mune ga zuki-zuki suru. somehow chest SUB zuki-zuki do ‘I didn’t feel anything until yesterday, but my chest feels zuki-zuki somehow.’

Although zuki-zuki is a versatile expression, there is a restriction on its use. Zukizuki depicts a type of pain one feels in a deep part of the body, as in the following examples (Smile Dental Clinic 2012; The Oto-Rhino-Laryngological Society of Japan 2012); (cf. Yamaguchi 2003: 247). One does not use zuki-zuki for pain on the skin. (8) Ha ga zuki-zuki itamu kanja-sama e. Ha ga zuki-zuki to itamu shoujou ga aru baai, ha no nekko no chiryou (konkan-chiryou) o shinai to ikenai baai ga ooi desu. Koko made kuru to houtteokeba dondon warui joutai ni naru dake ni narimasu.



Japanese interpretations of “pain” and the use of psychomimes

‘Dear patients who have zuki-zuki pain in their tooth. If you have symptoms of zuki-zuki pain in your tooth, quite often we need to treat the root of the tooth. If you leave it, it will only get worse.’ (9) Osamu-kun wa, kaze ga naorikaketa to omotteitara kyuuni mimi ga tsumatta kanji de zuki-zuki to itandekimashita. Jibi-inkou-ka de mitemorattara, kyuusei-chuujien to shindansaremashita. ‘When Osamu was just recovering from cold, he felt as if his ears were blocked and he had zuki-zuki pain. When he went to see an otorhinolaryngologist, the doctor diagnosed it as an acute middle otitis.’

In addition, examples (8) and (9) suggest that zuki-zuki implies that the situation is relatively serious (typically, the feeling is caused by internal damage such as infection). This observation indicates that the first components of zuki-zuki should be: ‘something bad is happening in one part of my body, inside my body’, and ‘I feel something bad in this part of my body because of this’. The next component is about the type of pain and how the sufferer feels when zuki-zuki is used. Zuki-zuki is generally defined as a pulsating or beating pain (Atouda and Hoshino 1993: 229). The explanation suggests that zuki-zuki portrays a pain as if it expands or contracts rhythmically, as the heart beats. One who suffers from zuki-zuki pain feels as if there is something inside one’s body, causing an ache similar to the rhythmic beating of one’s heart. This feature of zuki-zuki can be paraphrased by including in the imagined scenario the component: ‘something touches one part of this someone’s body, somewhere inside the body’, and ‘this something moves, like someone’s heart [m] moves’. (The Japanese equivalent to ‘heart’ is shinzou.) It is notable that zuki-zuki is also used to illustrate heartbreak (Gomi 2004: 91). Zuki-zuki is observed when one expresses psychological pain, as illustrated in (10) and (11), where kokoro is “heart” in the psychological sense (Ichigaya 2012; Mamaclub 2012). In (10), a politician feels zuki-zuki pain in her heart as she is not spending enough time with other people, including her family or for herself, while time passes quickly every day. In (11), a mother experiences zuki-zuki pain in her heart after reading a book on how to raise a boy, realizing that she has made many mistakes in the raising of her child. (10) Kokoro ga, zutto, zuki-zuki shi-masu. heart nom for.a.while zuki-zuki do-p ‘My heart has been feeling zuki-zuki.’

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(11)

Shou-gakusei o motsu oya no kokoro ga primary.school.student acc have parent gen heart nom zuki-zuki itamu hon zuki-zuki hurt book ‘If you have a child in primary school, this book will make your heart zukizuki.’

In the case of psychological pain, the sufferers illustrate the condition using analogy. Although the speakers are not exactly experiencing the same physical discomfort, the speakers try to convey the image of pain as if it beats rapidly as the heart. Based on these observations, the meaning of zuki-zuki can be explicated as follows: [A] My head/tooth/ear/chest/heart leg does zuki-zuki.

a. I think like this now:   “something bad is happening to one part of my body, inside my body b.   I feel something bad in this part of my body because of this” c. people can know how I feel if they can think like this for a short time: d.   “it is like this: e. something touches one part of this someone’s body, somewhere inside the body f. this something moves, like this someone’s heart [m] moves g. the same thing happens at many times for some time”

Components (a) and (b) mean that zuki-zuki signifies unpleasant physical sensations that one suffers due to an internal ailment. Components (c)–(g) show that zuki-zuki is analogous to the way one’s heart beats rhythmically.

Analysis of kiri-kiri Kiri-kiri is literally translated into English as a “continuous and sharp pain which one cannot endure” (Yamaguchi 2003: 111; see also Fukuda 2003: 42). The following example, from a health clinic’s website (Shohei Clinic 2012), illustrates how kiri-kiri expresses strong pain. (12) Itsuu niwa ikutsuka no dankai ga arimasu. Mottomo itami ga hidoi dankai to shite, shittenbattousuru youna, kiri-kiri suru hageshii itami ga tsuzuku sentsuu ga arimasu. ‘Stomach-ache has various stages. At the most severe level, one may experience colic pain, due to strong kirikiri pain. This is a type of pain one may writhe around in agony.’



Japanese interpretations of “pain” and the use of psychomimes

As shown in (12), kiri-kiri is used when the intensity of pain is high. In addition, similar to zuki-zuki, kiri-kiri is not used for pain which one feels on external parts such as the skin. For instance, kiri-kiri does not sound natural in the following case: (13) ? Hifu ga kiri-kiri suru. skin nom kiri-kiri do ‘My skin feels kiri-kiri.’

These observations indicate that kiri-kiri represents strong, bad feelings localized inside the body, implying: ‘something bad is happening in one part of my body, inside my body’ and ‘I feel something very bad in this part of my body’. Although there are examples where kiri-kiri is used for neck pain or headaches, most typically kiri-kiri describes abdominal pain, as illustrated in the following examples from website advertisements for stomach medicine (Taisho Pharmaceutical Co., LTD. 2012; Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited 2012): (14) Hirou ya sutoresu nado ni yori, i ya chou no kiri-kiri, kyuu tto sashikomu itami ni onayami no kata wa, mazu yakuzaishi ni soudan no ue, ‘Sutopan’ o tameshitemite wa? ‘If you are tired or stressed, and suffer from kiri-kiri pain or pain which feels like something is inserted kyuu, why don’t you try ‘Sutopan’ after consulting a pharmacist?’ (15)

Anchuusan wa, konna shoujou ni osusume. Sutoresu o kanjiruto, i ga kiri-kiri. Gen’in wa wakaranai kedo, i no choushi ga warui kamo. ‘Anchusan is recommended for the following symptoms: When I feel stressed, my stomach feels kiri-kiri. I don’t know why, but I feel my stomach is unwell.’

Atouda and Hoshino (1993: 103) explain that kiri-kiri indicates “the way one feels piercing pain continuously as if a drill is inserted”. Their explanation suggests that the affected area should be specific and small. One feels as if the damage is being caused by a sharp object. This feature suggests that in the imagined scenario, the following component should be included: ‘something sharp [m] touches one part of this someone’s body, somewhere inside this someone’s body’. (‘Sharp’ is surudoi in Japanese; the expression can be used both for a point and a blade.) Moreover, the interval of pain is relatively short, i.e., one suffers strong pain briefly.6 The following is an example which indicates this characteristic aspect of kiri-kiri. Kiri-kiri can be used together with a verb hashiru ‘run’ which represents fast movement (Just Answer LLC 2012): 6.  But the sufferer experiences pain continuously.

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(16) Nani mo shinai noni senaka ni kiri-kiri to itami ga hashiri, suguni osamaru. ‘I’m not doing anything, but kiri-kiri pain runs down my back, and then disappears.’

In (16), the sufferer describes his pain as if it runs down his back. The example suggests that kiri-kiri is a concentrated pain which one experiences in a very short time-frame. In summary, kiri-kiri feels as if the affected area is being damaged by a sharp object many times, and as a result, one feels strong pain. Based on these observations, the meaning of kiri-kiri can be explicated as follows: [B] My chest/stomach/back does kiri-kiri.

a. I think like this now:   “something bad is happening to one part of my body, inside my body b.   I feel something very bad in this part of my body because of this” c. people can know how I feel if they can think like this for a short time: d.   “it is like this: e. something sharp [m] touches one part of this someone’s body, somewhere inside the body in one moment f. the same thing happens at many times for some time”

Components (a) and (b) show that kiri-kiri stands for strong internal pain. Components (e) and (f) are a characteristic of kiri-kiri which is analogous to the way one feels when a sharp object is repeatedly inserted into the body-part.

Analysis of shiku-shiku The meaning of shiku-shiku contrasts with that of kiri-kiri. Shiku-shiku is often described as “dull pain” (Gomi 2004: 78). For instance, in both the following examples, shiku-shiku is used in a contrast to severe pain (ACSYS UN 2012; MG Inc. 2012): (17) Shikashi, shiku-shiku itamu no ka, hageshiku itamu no ka, i no shoujou o hakkiri funbetsusuru no wa muzukashii koto desu. ‘However, it is difficult to distinguish whether you feel shiku-shiku pain, or strong pain in your stomach.’ (18) Kinou yuugata yori hidari-mune ga shiku-shiku itamimasu. Tsuyoi itami dewa arimasen. ‘Since yesterday evening, I feel shiku-shiku pain on the left part of my chest. It is not strong pain.’

Also, there is an example which suggests that shiku-shiku represents “slow” pain. As mentioned above, one can say something like ‘kiri-kiri pain runs down my back’, whereas it is not natural to use shiku-shiku in the same situation. As shown



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in (19), shiku-shiku is not compatible with the verb hashiru ‘run’. This is because shiku-shiku expresses pain which one feels in a wide area. In other words, shikushiku is not the concentrated pain that kiri-kiri represents. (19) ? Nani mo shinai noni, senaka ni shiku-shiku to itami ga hashiri, suguni osamaru. ‘I’m not doing anything, but shiku-shiku pain runs down my back, and then disappears.’

Yamaguchi (2003) says that shiku-shiku depicts the way one experiences dull aches around internal body-parts, such as the abdomen. In fact, most of the examples of shiku-shiku found in the corpus refer to pain in or around the stomach area. Example (20), for instance, describes typical symptoms for a duodenal ulcer, suggesting pain around the solar plexus (the affected area is not specific) (Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited 2012): (20) Juunishichou-kaiyou wa isan ga ikai o shigekishimasukara, souchou ya kuufukuji ni mizoochi-shuuhen ga shiku-shiku to itami, shokuji o toru to osamarimasu. ‘In the case of duodenal ulcer, as stomach acid stimulates the ulcer, one feels shiku-shiku pain around the solar plexus in the early morning or when one is hungry. But the pain stops when one eats something.’

Similar to zuki-zuki and kiri-kiri, shiku-shiku cannot be used with external bodyparts, such as skin or nails. Thus one part of shiku-shiku can be explained as: ‘something bad is happening to one part of my body, inside my body’, and ‘I feel something bad in this part of my body’. Shiku-shiku often seems to signify vague and diffused pain. Observe the next example (Ando Medical Clinic 2012): (21) Nantonaku shiku-shiku to itami ga tsuzuku. somehow shiku-shiku P pain NOM continue ‘Shiku-shiku pain continues somehow.’

In (21), shiku-shiku is naturally used together with an adverb, nantonaku ‘somehow’. Nantonaku means one does not recognise a situation clearly, or one cannot specify a reason, goal or objective. This observation indicates that shiku-shiku implies that one cannot identify the exact spot where one feels pain. One simply feels as if something is affecting the body internally, repeatedly and rhythmically. Viewed in this light, the meaning of shiku-shiku can be explicated as follows:

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[C] My chest/stomach does shiku-shiku.

a. I think like this now:   “something bad is happening to one part of my body, inside my body b.   I feel something bad in this part of my body because of this” c. people can know how I feel if they can think like this for a short time: d.   “it is like this: e. something touches one part of this someone’s body f. this something is not something sharp [m] g. this something moves inside this part of this someone’s body h. the same thing happens at many times for some time”

Components (a) and (b) mean that shiku-shiku is an expression which describes internal pain. Components (c)–(h) indicate that one feels that the cause of pain is repeatedly affecting that body part, but it is not a concentrated pain, as would be implied by kiri-kiri.

Analysis of chiku-chiku Chiku-chiku is often translated as “prickly pain” (Akutsu 1994: 44). Gomi (2004: 109) also describes chiku-chiku as: “a sharp object pricking something and also the pain felt from such a prick”. As these explanations suggest, chiku-chiku expresses a type of pain which one feels as if a needle is pricking one’s body-part. There is an example to illustrate this point (NTT Resonant Inc. 2007): (22) I-sshuukan hodo mae kara karadajuu ga chiku-chiku to hari de sasareru youna itami ni nayandeimasu. ‘I’ve been suffering for a week, chiku-chiku pain as if a needle is pricking my skin all over.’

In (22), the speaker explicitly uses the metaphor of a needle. Thus as a first observation, this feature of chiku-chiku can be captured by including in the imagined scenario: ‘something very small touches one part of this someone’s body, not inside this someone’s body’ and ‘this something is very sharp [m]’. Here are examples to indicate that chiku-chiku is used as a clue for medical doctors in making a diagnosis. For instance (Preko 2011; Nakamura 2010): (23) Q. Tokidoki mune ga chiku-chiku itami, fuandesu. Shinzou ga warui no deshou ka? A. Chiku-chiku itamu no wa shinkei-tsuu desu. Rokkanshinkei-tsuu ga yoku shirareteimasu. Q. ‘I often have chiku-chiku pain in my chest and I’m worried. Do you think I have a heart problem?’



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A. ‘If you have chiku-chiku pain, you have got neuralgia. Intercostal neuralgia is well-known.’ (24) Mune no itami ga chiku-chiku suru shoujou o tomonau baai wa shinzoushinkeishou ga utagawaremasu. Mune no itami ga chiku-chiku suru to shinzoubyou o wazuratteiru nodewanai ka to shinpai ni narimasu ga, kyoutsuu ga dontsuu ya sasuyouna itami no baai wa, shinzou-byou dewa naku shinkeishou no hitotsu dearu shinzou-shinkeishou no kanousei ga takai deshou. ‘If you have symptoms of chiku-chiku pain in your chest, we suspect that it would be cardiac neurosis. If you have chiku-chiku pain in your chest, you may get worried about heart disease. But if your chest pain is dull or stabbing, there is a high possibility that it is not heart disease, but cardiac neurosis which is a type of neuralgia.’

Another example is (Recruit Doctor’s Career 2010): (25) ‘Chiku-chiku itamu’ to hyougensareta baai, naizou-tsuu dewanai to kangaemasu. ‘If someone describes ‘chiku-chiku pain’, we don’t consider it as visceral pain.’

In (25), the doctor states that chiku-chiku pain is not related to internal organs. Although the patient may worry that the cause is inside, chiku-chiku is the type of pain which one feels on the surface area of their body, such as skin or nerves. Therefore, chiku-chiku cannot be used to describe pain such as a toothache. Most typically chiku-chiku is used for skin problems, as shown below (Preko 2011): (26) Taijou-houshin nado mo hajime wa chiku-chiku itande, sono ato hageshii itami ya hasshin ga detekimasu. ‘In the case of shingles, you initially have chiku-chiku pain, and then the pain gets stronger or you will get a rash.’

In (26), a doctor uses chiku-chiku for describing the symptoms of shingles. As illustrated in this example, chiku-chiku pain is not strong or severe to the point that one cannot endure it. Chiku-chiku is a type of pain which one feels is simply uncomfortable on the external body part, indicating ‘something bad is happening in one part of my body, not inside my body’ and ‘I feel something bad, not very bad, in this part of my body’. Accordingly, the meaning of chiku-chiku can be represented as follows: [D] My skin does chiku-chiku.

a. I think like this now:   “something bad is happening in one part of my body, not inside my body b.   I feel something bad, not very bad, in this part of my body because of this”

100 Yuko Asano-Cavanagh

c. people can know how I feel if they can think like this for a short time: d.   “it is like this: e. something very small touches one part of this someone’s body, not inside the body,   in one moment f. this something is very sharp [m] g. the same thing happens at many times for some time”

Components (a), (e) and (f) are characteristic of chiku-chiku, and are different from other psychomimes.

Analysis of hiri-hiri This section presents an analysis of hiri-hiri which is often translated as “burning pain” (Akutsu 1994: 44), or “stinging pain” (Gomi 2004: 153). Similar to chikuchiku, hiri-hiri is used to express pain which one feels on an external part of body. Therefore it cannot be used for headache, toothache, abdominal pain, or back pain, which occur fully inside the body. Medical doctors often use hiri-hiri when describing pain on the tongue or in the throat. For instance (Furusawa Chiropractic Center 2012; Atoyofpsd 2008): (27) Gyakuryuusei-shokudouen to ishokudou-gyakuryuusei no kyoutsuusuru shoujou. Nodo ga itai, nodo ga hiri-hiri suru, nodo ga chiku-chiku suru, nodo ga igaiga suru, nodo ga tsukaeru nado, nodo ni iwakan ya fukaikan ga aru. ‘Common symptoms for reflux esophagitis and gastroesophageal reflux disease. You have sore throat, you feel hiri-hiri, chiku-chiku, or iga-iga in your throat, your throat is blocked, or you have discomfort or an unpleasant feeling in your throat.’ (28) ‘Zettsuu-shou’ to iu shita no byouki o shitteimasu ka? Shita ni hiri-hiri, piri-piri to shita manseitekina itami ya shibireta kanji ga tsuzuku shita no byouki desu. ‘Do you know a tongue disease called ‘glossodynia’? This is a tongue disease when one continues to feel chronic hiri-hiri or piri-piri pain, or feels numb.

Example (27) is from a website for a chiropractic centre, which uses hiri-hiri for describing typical symptoms for reflux esophagitis and gastroesophageal reflux disease. In (28), a doctor is explaining the symptoms of glossodynia, referring to hiri-hiri and piri-piri pain on tongue. In other cases, hiri-hiri can be used for eyes, or lips, but most typically, hiri-hiri is used to depict unusual symptoms on the skin. For instance (Wellness Communications Corporation 2012):

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(29) Dokutaa e soudan Senaka, waki nado ga hiri-hiri suru koto ga arimasu. Kayumi ga aru toki mo aru shi, nai toki mo arimasu. Itami ga aru toki mo arimasu. Shinkeitsuu no youna mono deshou ka? Dokutaa no kaitou Donna toki ni kayumi ya itami ga aru no ka ga, wakarimasen ga, hiri-hiri to iu shoujou wa hifu no hyoumen no kankaku nano de, hifu-byouhen nitsuite kangaetemimashou. ‘Question to doctor: I feel hiri-hiri on my back or under my arms. There are times when I feel itchy, or pain. Is this a kind of neuralgia? Doctor’s answer: I’m not sure when you feel itchy or pain, but hiri-hiri describes a sensation which we feel on the surface of the skin, so let’s consider skin disease.’

As the doctor states, hiri-hiri is the expression especially used for explaining abnormality on an external part of body. Thus the first component of hiri-hiri should be: ‘something bad is happening to one part of my body, not inside the body’. The question is, what kind of sensation does hiri-hiri signify? Kadooka (2001) observes that hiri represents ‘tension’, ‘strain’, or ‘nervousness’. Gomi (2004) states that hiri-hiri is also used to describe a burning mouth after eating hot or spicy food. In addition, when one suffers from a burn or sunburn, hiri-hiri is used as below (Tokusuru Jouhou Otodokeshimasu 2012; Yahoo Japan 2012): (30)

Yakedo no oukyuu-shochi Yakedo no shoujou niwa san-dankai arimasu. Ichi wa hiyake nado, hiri-hiri suru teido de mizu-bukure ga dekinai joutai. ‘First-aid treatment for burns There are three stages for symptoms of burns. The first stage is the condition where you just feel hiri-hiri and you don’t have a blister, such as you get with sunburn.’

Hiyakeshite hiri-hiri shiteimasu. Nanika yawarageru houhou toka kusuri wa arimasu ka? Hiyake wa, yakedo no isshu desu kara, tonikaku reikyaku ga ichiban desu. Akakunatte hiri-hiri suru baai wa, aisunon ya koori no haitta biniirubukuro o nure-taoru de tsutsunde, yukkuri jikkuri hiyashimasu. 20-punkan o medo ni hazushi, taion o modoshimasu. Soredemo mada hiri-hiri suru nara, mou ikkai kurikaeshimasu. Q. ‘I feel hiri-hiri from sunburn. Do you know any way to soothe this or is there any good medicine?

(31) Q. A.

102 Yuko Asano-Cavanagh

A. Sunburn is a type of burn, so the best way is to cool it down. If the affected area becomes red and you feel hiri-hiri, cool it slowly by placing an ice bag wrapped in a wet towel on it. Leave it for 20 minutes, and then wait until the temperature becomes normal. If you still feel hirihiri, repeat this method.’

In (30), hiri-hiri is used to describe the initial stage of a burn. Likewise in (31), hiri-hiri is used to explain the symptom of sunburn. As these examples indicate, hiri-hiri is not a serious pain and it can be tolerated. One feels as if something hot touches the skin and as a result, it feels painful. This aspect of hiri-hiri can be captured by including the following component in the imagined scenario: ‘it is like this: something touches one part of this someone’s body, not inside the body’ and ‘this something is like small fire [m]’. Hiri-hiri can also be observed in explaining dry eyes or dry skin caused by lack of moisture or wind. In both cases, hiri-hiri is an unpleasant sensation in which something hot continuously stimulates the affected body part. Viewed in this light, the following explication of hiri-hiri can be presented: [E] My skin/tongue/eye/lips/throat does hiri-hiri.

a. I think like this now:   “something bad is happening in one part of my body, not inside my body b.   I feel something bad, not very bad, in this part of my body because of this” c. people can know how I feel if they can think like this for a short time: d.   “it is like this: e. something touches one part of this someone’s body, not inside the body f. this something is like small fire [m] g. the same thing happens at many times for some time”

Component (b) indicates that hiri-hiri is not a strong type of pain which cannot be endured. Components (e) and (f) show the unique meaning of hiri-hiri, i.e. that one feels as if something hot is causing the uncomfortable sensation.

Analysis of gan-gan Gan-gan is often translated as a “pounding pain” (Akutsu 1994: 44). Unlike other psychomimes, the use of gan-gan is restricted to pain in specific parts of the body, typically the head, sometimes the ears. Example (32) is a typical case of gan-gan, being used to describe a headache (Sengoku Clinic 2009): (32) Gan-gan itakute taerarenai youna hageshii zutsuu. ‘A strong headache that you feel gan-gan pain and cannot tolerate.’



Japanese interpretations of “pain” and the use of psychomimes 103

On the other hand, it is not natural to use gan-gan for pain that one feels on the hands, legs, feet, abdomen, or skin: (33) ? Ashi/o-naka/hifu ga gan-gan suru. leg/p-abdomen/skin nom gan-gan do ‘My leg/abdomen/skin does gan-gan.’

The reason is that gan-gan evokes a sound similar to someone banging something, i.e. there is a direct resemblance between the sound of the word and the sound that gan-gan represents. For instance, gan-gan is often used as an onomatopoeic expression. Example (34) is explaining the symptoms for cluster headache (Sapporo Azabu Neurosurgical Hospital 2012). Here gan-gan is used as an adverb to imitate real sounds. For Japanese speakers, when one knocks against something hard, it sounds like gan-gan. (34) Henzutsuu towa chigai jittoshiteirarezu, atama o kabe ni gan-gan uchitsukeru hito mo iru kurai. ‘It (cluster headache) is different from a migraine. One may even knock one’s head against a wall gan-gan as one cannot stay still.’

Presumably because of the implicit connection with the ears, only body-parts above one’s neck, such as the head and ears, can perceive pain as gan-gan. In addition, as shown in the examples, the pain is relatively strong as one cannot stand up or stay still. This aspect of gan-gan can be interpreted as: ‘something bad is happening inside my head [m]’ and ‘I feel something very bad in this part of my body’. The next issue is what kind of sound gan-gan symbolizes. Atouda and Hoshino (1993: 71) explain that it describes the way or sound which a hard and heavy object, made of something such as metal or iron, repeatedly knocks or hits against something. As Hamano (1998), Ito (2002: 63), Tamori (2001: 45) and Kadooka (2001: 48) also point out, the voiced initial consonant in gan-gan conveys the impression of a louder and heavier sound than an unvoiced sound would. These explanations suggest that, as a psychomime, gan-gan means that one feels pain as if a hard object, such as metal, is banging against one’s head repeatedly. This feature of gan-gan can be rephrased as: ‘something very hard [m] touches this someone’s head [m] in one moment’, and ‘this something is made of [m] metal [m]’. (In Japanese, ‘hard’ is katai, ‘is made of ’ is dekiteiru, and ‘metal’ is kinzoku). Next, as mentioned above, gan-gan is often used as an onomatopoeic expression which imitates real sounds. For instance (Toyama Cyber Naifu Center 2012): (35) Ugoku to gan-gan to atama ni hibiite tsurai. ‘When I move, it hurts as the pain echoes gan-gan in my head.’

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As illustrated in the example, one feels pain as if it echoes gan-gan in one’s head. This observation indicates that the imagined scenario of gan-gan includes: ‘this someone can hear something in his/her head [m] because of this’. Based on these observations, the meaning of gan-gan can be portrayed as follows: [F] My head/ear does gan-gan.

a. I think like this now:   “something bad is happening inside my head [m] b.   I feel something very bad in this part of my body because of this” c. people can know how I feel if they can think like this for a short time: d.   “it is like this: e. something very hard [m] touches this someone’s head [m] in one moment f. this something is like something made of [m] metal [m] g. this someone can hear something in his/her head [m] because of this h. the same thing happens at many times for some time”

3. Concluding remarks The meanings of six psychomimes have been examined and explicated in a common semantic template. Each psychomime conveys a metaphorical meaning, which describes the pain quality as if something sharp, hot, or metallic is moving inside a part of the body or is touching a part of the body. Among the six psychomimes, only shiku-shiku does not have such a direct metaphorical meaning. This is probably because shiku-shiku is a type of dull pain and there is no clear resemblance to any specific situation. Gan-gan is unique in the sense that the expression has a literal onomatopoeic quality, which means it is as if one can hear the actual sound of gan-gan in one’s head. Interestingly, joy and happiness are not usually described using psychomimes in Japanese, and the number of relevant expressions is quite limited. In expressing such positive feelings, one would simply emphasize the intensity of emotion using the words such as totemo ‘very’, taihen ‘considerably’, hijouni ‘extremely’, or kokoro kara ‘from the bottom of heart’. This is presumably because it is not as necessary to describe joy or happiness precisely, while one often wants to explain pain quality in detail, especially in a medical consultation. As will now be clear, the use of psychomimes is quite convenient for describing pain quickly. One psychomime is often sufficient, as the expression has a specific meaning which is different from other symptoms and can evoke vivid images of the experience. By use of semantic primes, it is possible to explicate the meanings of the psychomimes and identify the subtle differences between them to speakers of any language. Also, it is important to note that different languages may well use different

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metaphors in describing pain. By comparing the interpretation of pain in different languages, we can reveal what is common across these languages and what is specific to each language and culture.

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Appendix.  List of sources ACSYS UN Co. Ltd. (2012). Touyou-igaku (Eastern Medicine). Retrieved from http://www.acsysun.co.jp/counseling/byouki/b_jyouhanshin25.html Ando Medical Clinic. (2012). Sokenka. Retrieved from http://sokenka.jp/index.php?id=75 Atoyofpsd. (2008). Odoru Shika-shinshinshou Net (Net for dental disease and psychosomatic disorder). Retrieved from http://atoyofpsd.net/sikasinsin/glosso/glossodynia_1.html Furusawa Orthopaedic Clinic. (2012). Kanja-san no koe (Patients’ voice). Retrieved from http:// www.h5.dion.ne.jp/~furusawa/shokudoen/chigai.html Ichigaya, T. (2012). Retrieved from http://i.jcpdan.com/

108 Yuko Asano-Cavanagh Just Answer LLC. (2012). JustAnswer. Retrieved from http://www.justanswer.jp/internalmedicine/6prqo-.html Juzen Chiropractic Health Care Clinic. (2012). Retrieved from http://www.juzen.net/headache_ occiput.html Mamaclub. (2012). Retrieved from http://mamaclubuno.blog56.fc2.com/blog-entry-78.html MG Inc. (2012). Ask Doctors. Retrieved from http://heart.askdoctors.jp/qa/heart-disease-andhigh-blood/heart-disease/t227985.do Miminari-chiryou, Miminari no genin o saguru. (2007). Miminari (Tinnitus). Retrieved from http://www.larufu.net/miminari/ Nakamura. (2010). Mune no itami nabi (Chest pain navigation). Retrieved from http://muneitami.com/item2/item77.html NTT Resonant Inc. (2007). Oshiete Goo. Retrieved from http://oshiete.goo.ne.jp/qa/3041470. html Otodokeshimasu, Tokusuru Jouhou. (2012). Yakedo no oukyuu-shochi (Emergency treatment for burn). Retrieved from www.ashuashu.com/yakedo/ Preko. (2011). Konnichiwa! Junkankika-naika desu! (Hello! This is the department of cardiology and internal disease). Retrieved from http://preko.jp/blog/format?blg=702 Recruit Co. Ltd. (2010). Retrieved from http://r25.yahoo.co.jp/fushigi/rxr_detail/?id=2010052000002353-r25 Recruit Doctor’s Career. (2010). Koko karada. Retrieved from http://www.cocokarada.jp/column/qa/0611/02.shtml Rokkan-shinkeitsuu jiten. (2012). Retrieved from http://rokkan.no-jiten.com/ Sapporo Azabu Neurosurgical Hospital. (2012). Zutsuu (Headache). Retrieved from http:// www.azabunougeka.or.jp/new/syoujyou/zutuu.html Sengoku Clinic. (2009). Zutsuu (Headache). Retrieved from http://www.sengoku-clinic.com/ nou/index.html Shohei Clinic. (2012). Chinese herbs for women. Retrieved from http://shohei-clinic.com/kanpo04-10.html Smile Dental Clinic. (2012). Retrieved from http://smile-clinic.jp/treatment/care/zukizuki.html Taisho Pharmaceutical Company Limited. (2012). AllAbout. Retrieved from http://allabout. co.jp/1/222255/1/product/222255.htm Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited. (2012a). StressLessAge. Retrieved from http://stressjidai.jp/products/type-i/ Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited. (2012b). Takeda Health Site. Retrieved from http:// takeda-kenko.jp/navi/navi.php?key=mizoochi The Oto-Rhino-Laryngological Society of Japan. (2012). Retrieved from http://www.jibika. or.jp/handbook/mimi3.html Toyama Cyber Naifu Center. (2012). Zutsuu (Headache). Retrieved from http://www.cybertoyama.jp/001_gofuku-gairai/gofuku-gairai_headache.html UN, ACSYS. (2012). Iroirona byouki no kaisetsu (Explanations of various disease). Retrieved from http://www.acsysun.co.jp/counseling/byouki/b_jyouhanshin25.html Wellness Communications Corporation. (2012). Dokutaa soudanshitsu (Doctor’s consultation). Retrieved from http://www.pluswellness.com/soudan/6005.html Yahoo Japan Corporation. (2012). Yahoo Japan Chiebukuro (Yahoo Japan Wisdom). Retrieved from http://detail.chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/qa/question_detail/q139024158

Some remarks on “pain” in Latin American Spanish Zuzanna Bułat Silva

Australian National University and University of Wrocław

[our] emotional lives — and cognitive worlds — are significantly shaped by the particular languages we live with.  (Mary Besemeres 2011: 502) The aim of this chapter is to examine the Spanish counterpart of pain, that is, the lexeme dolor. It seems that dolor, different from both English pain and French douleur, has two clearly distinguishable meanings, dolor1 referring to physical (and emotional) sensation of pain, and dolor2, a quite frequent emotion term belonging to the domain of “sadness.” This article examines different lexical occurrences of the word dolor, coming inter alia from tango lyrics, in order to support the above hypothesis. Keywords: pain, dolor, Spanish, cross-cultural psychology, Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM)

When we type into Google search the Spanish phrase dolor de, roughly ‘pain of (something),’ the most common result will be dolor de cabeza ‘headache,’ and then dolor de espalda ‘backache.’1 There are also other types of physical ‘pain’ that will appear quite frequently: dolor de estómago ‘stomachache,’ dolor de garganta ‘sore throat,’ and dolor de piernas ‘leg pain.’ But just like the English word pain (although much more frequently), the Spanish word dolor can also refer to “emotional pain,” as in the example given by the Concise Oxford Spanish Dictionary (Carvajal & Horwood 2009), no sabes el dolor que me causa su indiferencia ‘you have no idea how much his indifferent attitude hurts me.’ While talking about “pain” though, 1.  These results are corroborated by the CREA, Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (http:// corpus.rae.es/creanet.html). Out of 478 instances of dolor(es) in the spoken language corpus, there are 42 examples of dolor(es) de cabeza. doi 10.1075/bct.84.06bul 2016 © John Benjamins Publishing Company

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both physical and emotional, Spanish speakers would most often use the expression me duele (algo) ‘(something) hurts me,’ as in me duele la cabeza ‘I have got a headache,’ or me duele perderte ‘it hurts when I lose you.’ They will also use an exclamative ¡qué dolor!, roughly ‘what a pain!’ while expressing that something hurts or troubles them. And if the ‘pain’ is really insoportable ‘insupportable,’ they may say ¡el dolor me está matando!, literally ‘the pain is killing me.’ This chapter, which deals with the concept of “pain” in Latin American Spanish, will test the following hypothesis: Spanish dolor, different from both English pain and French douleur (Wierzbicka 2014), has two clearly distinguishable meanings, dolor1 referring to physical sensation of “pain,” and dolor2, a quite frequent emotion term belonging to the domain of “sadness.” The chapter will be organized as follows. First, the basic Spanish expression me duele will be compared with its English counterpart it hurts. Then I will examine how the word dolor is portrayed by the dictionaries, and check how it is pictured in tango lyrics. Next some evidence of the cultural salience of dolor — like the existence of numerous feminine names referring explicitly to human suffering — will be given. Finally, I will compare dolor with its English, French, and Polish counterparts, pain, douleur, and ból, respectively. 1. It hurts versus me duele It is interesting to note that the verb to hurt is best translated into Spanish as doler, a cognate of dolor. Thus, it hurts is usually translated as me duele, the link between ‘pain’ and ‘hurt’ being much more visible in Spanish than in English. (Hurt as a noun is usually rendered as dolor, and hurt as an adjective as dolorido or dolido). Also, the absence of a word matching ache in meaning, as can be seen in the above examples where English compounds of the form ‘something-ache’ translate as dolor de algo, results in the word dolor being used much more often than its English counterpart pain. What in English is communicated via four different words, sore, ache, pain and hurt (see e.g. Fábrega & Tyma 1976: 325; Goddard & Wierzbicka 2014: 163), in Spanish can be rendered using just one word, dolor (together with its derivatives, doler and dolorido).2 The difference between it hurts and me duele is quite a substantial one: whereas it hurts suggests a localized and short-term feeling (Goddard & Wierzbicka 2014: 162), me duele although prototypically presupposing a concrete bodily localization, does not indicate a short duration of this sensation. Me duele is “linked 2.  Although, of course, there are other Spanish words that can substitute dolor in some contexts, like daño (as in, me he hecho daño en la espalda ‘I’ve hurt my back’) or pena (see Section 2).

Some remarks on “pain” in Latin American Spanish 111



with an identifiable locus,” but not with “an immediately preceding cause,” as it hurts is (Goddard & Wierzbicka 2014: 162). In this respect Spanish me duele is much more like French ça fait mal. See [A] and [B] below. In contrast to It hurts (see line (b) of explication [A]), in me duele, just like in French ça fait mal, the event and the feeling are concurrent (Goddard & Wierzbicka 2014: 166), and there is no emphasis either on external or internal body-parts (Goddard & Wierzbicka 2014: 175). Spanish me duele is explicated in [C] below. [A] It hurts (Goddard and Wierzbicka 2014: 165)

a. something is happening to a part of my body b.   because something bad happened to it a very short time before c. I feel something bad in this part of my body because of this d. I don’t want this

[B] Ça fait mal (Goddard and Wierzbicka 2014: 175) a. b. c.

something bad is happening to a part of my body I feel something bad in this part of my body because of this I don’t want this

[C] Me duele1 (la cabeza, el estómago, la pierna…) a. b. c.

something bad is happening to a part of my body I feel something bad in this part of my body because of this I don’t want this

But there is a problem with the definition of me duele given in [C]. As was said before, we can also say in Spanish Me duele perderte ‘it hurts to lose you,’ and in this case there is a “preceding cause” but no “identifiable locus.” So perhaps a second meaning of me duele should be postulated with the following explication: [D] Me duele2 perderte

a. something bad happened (to me) a short time before b. because of this I feel something very bad c.   like someone can feel when something very bad happens to a part of this someone’s body e. I don’t want this3

2. Dolor in the dictionaries Spanish language dictionaries usually give two different meanings of the noun dolor: roughly, (1) ‘physical pain’ and (2) ‘grief ’, ‘sorrow.’ In the Gran Diccionario de la Lengua Española (GDLE 1995: 701), this first meaning is rendered as sensación 3.  I am not sure whether the event that causes dolor is necessarily something personal, hence the parenthesis in line (a).

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molesta y desagradable que se produce en una parte del cuerpo por causa interior o exterior a éste ‘unpleasant feeling happening in one part of the body for internal or external reasons.’ The second meaning is described by Manuel Seco et al. (1999: 1664) as sentimiento que se deriva de la insatisfacción de un deseo o una necesidad o de la presencia de algo que se considera malo y no se desea que continúe ‘feeling resulting from a dissatisfied desire or need, or from a presence of something that we regard as bad and do not want it to be continued.’ When looking at synonyms, in its first meaning dolor can also be rendered as molestia ‘discomfort,’ and mal, ‘illness,’ ‘pain,’ whereas in its second meaning it can be referred to as pena roughly ‘sorrow,’ or tristeza ‘sadness’ (Carvajal & Horwood 2009; VOX 2007). There are often two more senses postulated by the dictionaries, namely: dolor as ‘regret,’ as María Moliner (2007: 1076) puts it, sentimiento producido por un daño causado a otro ‘a feeling resulting from hurting someone,’ and dolor as ‘compassion,’ sentimiento causado (…) por ver padecer a una persona querida ‘a feeling caused (…) by witnessing the suffering of someone we love’ (exemplified with a phrase los dolores de la Virgen, roughly ‘sorrows of the Virgin Mary’). In this last sense dolor is really close to Polish word boleść (cf. Wierzbicka 2012: 51), actually translated by the Spanish-Polish dictionaries as dolor (e.g., Perlin 2002: 127). A meaning like ‘compassion’ can also be conveyed by the verb doler, as in the sentence A cualquiera le dolería ver trabajar de ese modo a una criatura ‘Everybody would feel sorry to see a kid working like that’ (Moliner 2007: 1076). Still, I think that those two senses are only the contextual variants of the emotional meaning of dolor and doler, respectively. Hence explication [D], presented above, describes quite well the meaning of le duele present in the sentence just quoted. 3. Dolor in tangos The Argentine tango is said to be canción que nació de tu dolor y mi dolor ‘a song that was born out of your pain and my pain’ (Melodía porteña, Enrique Santos Discépolo, 1937). And, as I have tried to show earlier (Bułat Silva 2012: 65), dolor, together with amor ‘love,’ pasado ‘the past,’ and muerte ‘death,’ is one of the tango key words. Contrary to what emerges from the Google search, out of 123 instances of the word dolor(es) in a corpus consisting of 100 tango lyrics, the vast majority of the examples refer to emotional pain, with only three cases referring to physical pain. Some exemplary contexts of dolor in tangos are: dolor de comprender ‘pain of understanding,’ dolor de un suspiro ‘pain of a sigh,’ dolor de la espera ‘pain of waiting,’ dolor de vida ‘pain of life,’ dolor de mil traiciones ‘pain of a thousand betrayals,’ dolor de un sueño muerto ‘pain of a dead dream,’ rather than dolor de cabeza and



Some remarks on “pain” in Latin American Spanish 113

dolor de espalda. Most of the above contexts are clearly figurative, but I believe that while searching for its meaning analyzing metaphorical uses of a word may be very revealing. Dolor in tangos is mostly related to amor ‘love,’ ‘passion,’ and is caused by traición ‘betrayal,’ ausencia ‘absence,’ and falta ‘lack,’ of amor, ternura y caricias ‘love, tenderness and caresses’ (see the above mentioned second meaning of dolor in Seco at al. 1999).4 It often results from nostalgia, ‘nostalgia’ and recuerdos, ‘memories’ about the past, el pasado. Dolor is felt in one’s alma, ‘soul,’ corazón, ‘heart,’ and pecho ‘chest.’ It is viewed as an essential component of life, and compañero del placer ‘goes hand in hand with pleasure.’ It can be dulce ‘sweet’ or cruento ‘cruel’ (Bułat Silva 2012: 66). Viejo barrio de mi ensueño, el de ranchitos iguales, como a vos los vendavales a mí me azotó el dolor. 

Old quarter of my dreams Where all houses are the same You were whipped by the winds I was whipped by pain. — Barrio reo, Alfredo Navarrine, 1927.

As the metaphorical conceptualizations of dolor in tangos show (DOLOR is seen as a BEAST, BURDEN, PRISON, SHADOW and WIND; see Bułat Silva 2011, 2012), dolor is a really intense emotion, so intense that it can be experienced physically.5 4. Dolores, Angustias, Soledad, Spanish feminine names referring to suffering In their study on culture and emotion in Latin America, Elena Zubieta et al. (1998: 5) say that among the characteristics of Latin American culture there is “un cierto fatalismo, impregnado de religiosidad” ‘a certain fatalism impregnated with religiousness,’ and also “el aceptar el sufrimiento en la vida” ‘the acceptance of suffering in the life.’ In the Spanish-speaking world, it seems, there is a greater consent for expressing negative emotions (but only the ones that are not seen as threatening, see Zubieta et al. 1998: 5–6). To feel means to live, and good emotions like amor, alegria, ternura are seen as intrinsically related to bad feelings, such as dolor, pena, or aflicción. People depend more on each other and thus communicate 4.  It is worth noting here that amor is the most frequent rhyme to dolor, as in the old Spanish proverb: más vale pan con amor que gallina con dolor, literally ‘it is better to have bread with love, than chicken with sorrow.’ This can also be seen in tango lyrics, where dolor goes hand in hand with amor, not only because love makes us suffer, but for purely prosodic reasons. 5.  The capital letters I use here express conceptual metaphors, following the notation of Lakoff and Johnson (1980).

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more freely on how they feel (see Travis 2006; Zubieta et al. 1998). Suffering in Spanish-speaking cultures can be ‘domesticated.’ Dolor can be suave ‘soft’ or dulce ‘sweet,’ as in tango. Of course, one must take into account that there are many varieties of Spanish in the world, each of them being considerably different — Spanish in Europe differs a lot from the varieties spoken in Latin America — so what holds true for Latin American Spanish language and culture, may well be seen as outdated in Spain. Another piece of evidence of a welcoming attitude towards “pain” in Spanish are the feminine names referring to suffering. People in Latin America (and in the southern part of Spain) still give their baby girls names such as Dolores, literally ‘Pains,’ Angustias, ‘Sorrows’ or Soledad, ‘Loneliness.’ Dolores, a reference to the Virgin Mary, Virgen de los Dolores, or Nuestra Señora de los Dolores, ‘Our Lady of Sorrows,’ together with its diminutives Lola and Loles, is quite a common Spanish name (in the heraldic list of most frequent baptism names for girls in Spain it occupies the 9th place, and the compound Maria Dolores, the 6th place, http:// www.heraldica.es/nombres/nombresmujer.htm). There are more feminine names referring to suffering, that, although not as common as the above three, are still in use. There is Martirio ‘Martyrdom,’ Olvido ‘Oblivion,’ and Lágrimas ‘Tears.’ In Latin America a very common compound name is María de la Cruz, or Maricruz, ‘Mary of the Cross,’ referring to Virgin Mary and her witnessing Christ’s suffering on the cross. There are also names that allude to suffering antonymically, such as Consuelo, ‘Consolation’ (short for Nuestra Señora del Consuelo, ‘Our Lady of Consolation’), Amparo ‘Shelter,’ and Remedio ‘Cure.’ 5. English pain and Spanish dolor When we look at the dictionary translations of pain into Spanish, we can see that it is not only translated as dolor, but also as sufrimiento (We had to go through a lot of pain to get to where we are in life is rendered as ‘Tuvimos que pasar por muchos sufrimientos para llegar al lugar que ocupamos ahora,’ Word Reference 2013).6 The English phrase to be in pain, where pain is “conceived as global” (see Goddard and Wierzbicka 2014: 162), is best translated as estar sufriendo, roughly ‘to suffer.’ When, on the other hand, we look at the Spanish-English dictionaries, we will see that dolor in its emotional sense is rarely translated as pain, its usual counterparts are grief or sorrow (Carvajal & Horwood 2009; Wordsworth Spanish 6.  The word pain etymologically comes from Latin poena, ‘punishment’ (this meaning is still preserved in English in a fixed expression under pain of death). It is interesting to note that the same Latin word gave Spanish pena, meaning not only ‘punishment,’ but also ‘sorrow,’ ‘grief ’ or ‘pity.’



Some remarks on “pain” in Latin American Spanish 115

Dictionary 1991). Dolor is also translated into English by means of verbs: con todo el dolor de mi corazón tuve que decirle que no ‘it broke my heart, but I had to turn him down’ and no sabes el dolor que me causa su indiferencia ‘you have no idea how much his indifferent attitude hurts me’ (Carvajal & Horwood 2009; see also Bułat Silva 2012: 64). But there are also similarities between the two — just like pain, dolor seems to be prototypically localized: ‘one is feeling something bad in part of the body;’ see lines (c) and (d) of explication [E] below, quoted after Goddard & Wierzbicka (2014: 155). [E] She felt pain

a. she felt something bad at that time, b.   like someone can feel when it is like this: c. something bad is happening to a part of this someone’s body d. this someone feels something bad in this part of the body because of this e. this someone can’t not think like this at this time: “I don’t want this”

Pain is never explained in the English dictionaries as ‘sadness,’ and it would normally not appear on a list of ‘negative emotions.’ Dolor, on the contrary, is explained via ‘sadness’ (Carvajal & Horwood 2009; VOX 2007), and does appear on negative emotions lists (see e.g., Elpidio 2011). In Spanish there is a common phrase dolor del alma literally ‘pain of the soul,’ with no counterpart in English, that means something like a ‘deep sorrow,’ as in madrina, me despido com mucho cariño y el dolor del alma ‘[dear] godmother, I bid farewell with lots of love and a deep sorrow’ (http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=349509). Overall, dolor seems to have a much wider range of use than pain, being similar to French douleur in this respect. The Biblical Man of Sorrows (Isaiah 53:3, see Wierzbicka 2012: 29) is translated in the Bible as varón de dolores (BRV 1960) or hombre lleno de dolor (BVP 1992), similarly to French Homme de Douleur.7 6. French douleur and Spanish dolor (Why is dolor different from douleur?) What is true for French douleur, that it “evokes emotions far more than pain does” (Goddard & Wierzbicka 2014: 169), seems true also for Spanish dolor — as was said before, in the tango lyrics dolor is used almost exclusively to convey emotional pain. Like douleur, dolor is an intense and overwhelming emotion that can be experienced (and expressed) physically (see Wierzbicka 2012: 41). 7.  In a title song referring to the same Biblical passage, however, it was translated as Hombre Triste ‘Sad Man’ (Man of Sorrows, a song by Bruce Dickinson).

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Unlike its French counterpart though, Spanish dolor is usually localized. What in French is described with a word mal, as in ça fait mal, or mal de tête, is rendered as dolor in Spanish — ça fait mal is best translated as me duele, and mal de tête as dolor de cabeza — the reference point for dolor being rather a body-part, and not a whole body as for douleur (Wierzbicka 2012: 38). See also lines (c) and (d) of explication [F] below, taken from Goddard & Wierzbicka (2014: 172). In case of dolor, this prototypical localized bodily feeling is commonly extended to the whole person, as in dolor de un sueño muerto, ‘pain of a dead dream.’ [F] She felt douleur (elle ressentait de la douleur).

a. she felt something bad b.   like someone can feel when it is like this: c. something bad is happening to this someone’s body for some time d. because of this, this someone feels something very bad in the body for some time e. this someone can’t not think like this at that time: “I don’t want this”

Both English “pain” described via four different words (sore, ache, pain and hurt), and French “pain,” usually referred to as douleur and mal, are different from Spanish “pain” — because in Spanish, to talk about localized unpleasant bodily symptoms and emotional suffering engulfing the whole person, one can use just one word, dolor. There is one other important difference in what we may call, after Goddard and Wierzbicka (2014), the discourse of douleur and the discourse of dolor. Whereas in French douleur is contrasted with bonheur, roughly ‘happiness,’ and not with plaisir ‘pleasure’ (Wierzbicka 2014: 25), in Spanish dolor collocates better with placer, ‘pleasure’ or bienestar, ‘well-being,’ than with felicidad (actually, it would be hardly ever perceived as an antonym to felicidad, because it is almost seen as its meronym: dolor is a necessary component of a happy life, see Bułat Silva 2012). It seems though that the best opposite of dolor would be gozo or alegria, both translated as ‘joy.’ Book titles such as Los siete dolores y gozos de la vida de San José (Wasikowski 2012) or Dolor y alegria. Women and Social Change in Urban Mexico (LeVine 1993), translated into English as Seven sorrows and joys of Saint Joseph and Sorrows and joys. Women and Social Change in Urban Mexico, show this quite well. 8

8.  Dolores y gozos de San José is a name of a Catholic prayer, similar to Via Crucis.



Some remarks on “pain” in Latin American Spanish 117

7. Two meanings of “pain” in Polish and in Spanish In their insightful considerations on “pain,” Goddard and Wierzbicka (2014: 162) claim that unlike pain, the English word hurt has two meanings: a physical and an emotional one. The noun pain is said to have only one meaning covering both physical and emotional suffering. This may be true for English, but Polish and Spanish seem to behave differently with respect to seeing emotional and physical pain as a unitary phenomenon. Let me consider first the closest equivalents of pain (noun) and hurt (verb) in Polish, respectively ból and its derivative boleć.9 In Polish we can say (1) Bolało ją chore kolano, ‘Her bad knee hurt’ (the structure of this sentence in Polish is VOS: right after the verb we have the direct object, that is, the person experiencing pain, and then the subject, ‘knee’) and, using the same grammatical pattern, we can also say (2) Bolały ją ostre słowa matki, ‘Her mother’s harsh words were hurtful for her.’ In the former, we may see that the noun following the verb boleć serves to specify the location of the pain (it is located in the knee), whereas in the latter it specifies its cause (her mother’s harsh words made her feel bad). We may see then that in its physical sense (1) boleć requires a noun that specifies where the pain is localized, what part of the body is in pain, and in its emotional sense (2) boleć is followed by a noun that specifies what was the reason of the pain. It seems justified then to posit two senses for the verb boleć (just like for the English verb hurt). Analogously, we may speak about ból głowy ‘headache’ and ból porażki ‘pain of the defeat.’ In the first phrase głowy ‘of the head’ shows the location of the pain, and in the second one porażki ‘of the defeat’ demonstrates its cause. Here again it seems that the noun ból, ‘pain,’ when thought of as a physical phenomenon requires specifying its location (and the cause may be added separately, as in ból głowy z powodu migreny ‘headache because of migraine’), but when conceptualized as an emotion it is always followed by a noun specifying its cause. (There exists also a metaphorical expression ból serca ‘heartache’ meaning roughly ‘sorrow,’ ‘grief,’ where the structure is that of the physical pain, ‘pain + location’ — and actually in its literary sense, it is a physical pain of a heart that it refers to — but in this expression it is clear that ‘pain’ is metaphorical: ‘I feel as if I had a heartache,’ and my ‘heart’ can hurt because it is being conceptualized as a ‘part of the body responsible for emotions’). It is reasonable then to postulate two senses of the noun ból, analogous to 9.  Actually there are two homonymous Polish verbs derived from ból: boleć1 (coś mnie boli, ‘something hurts me’) that can acquire both emotional and physical meaning, and boleć2 (boleję nad czymś, roughly ‘I am very sorry about something’) with only one, emotional meaning. See Chojnacka-Kuraś (2012) for very interesting remarks on the subject. Our considerations refer only to boleć1.

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those of boleć, a physical sense for the semantic frame of ‘pain + location,’ and an emotional sense where the frame is ‘pain + cause.’10 Let us turn now to Spanish equivalents of hurt and pain, that is, respectively, doler and dolor (stemming from the same Latin root dolere). Just as has been said earlier, in Spanish one expresses one’s pain most frequently using the expression me duele (algo) ‘(something) hurts me.’ We may say (3) Me duele la cabeza, ‘I have a headache,’ or (4) Me duele la pierna, ‘I have a pain in my leg’ (in Spanish this sentence structure is OVS, first we have got the experiencer, then the verb, and the body part in the end). Just like in Polish, me duele is followed by a body-part, specifying the location of the physical pain. But we may also say (5) Me duele perderte ‘It hurts when I lose you,’ or (6) Me duelen los recuerdos, ‘The memories hurt,’ and in this emotional meaning me duele(n) requires identifying the cause: ‘not having you near anymore’ (5) or ‘thinking about something that happened and that is not happening anymore’ (6) makes me feel bad. So just like for Polish boleć, and English hurt, for the Spanish verb doler two different semantic frames, and thus two different meanings, may be postulated. Looking at the Spanish noun dolor, we observe a similar behavior. Dolor de cabeza ‘headache’ and dolor de perderte ‘pain of losing you’ show, respectively, physical (dolor de + location) and emotional (dolor de + cause) meanings. In dolor de cabeza — and in other expressions referring to bodily pain — the semantic frame of dolor requires specifying its location, whereas in dolor de perderte or dolor de amarte ‘pain of loving you,’ it requires specifying its cause. In Spanish the former, dolor de cabeza, apart from its physical sense, can also have a figurative sense meaning something like ‘concern.’ And just as in Polish, we may also speak about dolor de corazón ‘heartache,’ that apart from its physical meaning has also developed a metaphorical sense — different from Polish — ‘regret,’ ‘repentance.’ There is also, already mentioned, dolor del alma ‘pain of the soul,’ quite a frequent expression referring to one’s emotional state and meaning ‘great sorrow.’11 In all the three examples the body-parts refer more to cognitive abilities of a man than to a location: cabeza is seen as a ‘part of the body responsible for thinking,’ corazón and alma are ‘parts responsible for feeling,’ hence the metaphorical, emotional meaning of the three. I would like to propose two different NSM explications for dolor in its physical and emotional senses: see [G] and [H] below. In the former, just as in the case of 10.  For a detailed analysis of physical and emotional meanings of Polish ból, see ChojnackaKuraś (2012). 11.  In Spanish alma seems to convey a ‘deepness’ of a feeling. See the following commentary: “(…) a veces utilizamos el alma para expresar sentimientos muy profundos: te quiero con toda el alma, lo deseo con toda mi alma, etc.” (forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=2194647).



Some remarks on “pain” in Latin American Spanish 119

me duele, there is no prototypical cognitive scenario, but a matter-of-fact description of ‘something bad happening to someone’s body’ and ‘feeling something bad because of this.’ In the latter, the description of a physical pain becomes a prototype for explicating emotional pain: ‘someone is feeling something bad like one can feel when one experiences a physical pain.’ I think it is quite a plausible hypothesis also from the cognitive point of view — when someone has dolor de espalda ‘a backache,’ there are some objective physical reasons (line (a)), and also some subjective feelings that relate to them, (cf. lines (b) and (c); see also Juan Nasio (2004) and Smith & Osborn (2007) for important considerations on the emotional nature of physical pain), whereas when someone feels dolor de la derrota ‘pain of the defeat,’ one suffers emotionally because of ‘something bad that happened to this someone’ (line (a)), there are not necessarily any bodily processes involved, but this dolor can hurt even more than the one experienced physically (line (b)). As we can see from explication [H] below, the bodily experience of dolor1 remains a prototype for defining the emotion term of dolor2. [G] She felt dolor1 (ella sentía/ tenía dolor1, e.g. de espalda)

a. something bad was happening to a part of her body b.   because of this she felt something bad in this part of her body for some time c. she couldn’t not think like this at that time: “I don’t want this”

[H] She felt dolor2 (ella sentía dolor2, e.g. de la derrota)12

a. something bad happened to her a short time before b. because of this, she felt something very bad c.   like someone can feel when it is like this: d. something bad is happening to a part of this someone’s body d. because of this, this someone feels something bad in this part of the body for some time e. this someone can’t not think like this at that time: “I don’t want this”

8. Conclusions In this chapter I have tried to assess whether it is plausible to talk about two different meanings of the word dolor. I hope to have shown that dolor is different not only from English pain, but also from French douleur, that — although stemming from the same Latin etymon — has a considerably different range of use. Surprising as it may seem, dolor is much closer to Polish ból. Neither of them can be seen as a unitary phenomenon as pain or douleur, and as their semantic frames show, there is really a need to postulate polysemy in case of both dolor and ból. 12.  In its physical meaning, one can tener dolor ‘have a pain’ or sentir dolor ‘feel a pain;’ in its emotional meaning, one can only sentir dolor ‘feel a pain’ (Moliner 2007).

120 Zuzanna Bułat Silva

Dolor, contrary to Polish ból though, has much stronger emotional connotations. As the dictionary definitions that explain dolor as tristeza, ‘sadness’ demonstrate, a fact corroborated by listing dolor under the negative emotions category, dolor in one of its meanings is indeed conceptualized as an emotion in Spanish: ya no vuelvo mas amar porque detras del amor hay un sentimiento sentimiento de dolor en mi corazón lo siento ay que horrible sufrimiento quisiera mejor morir 

I am not going to fall in love again because behind love there is a feeling a feeling of dolor that I feel in my heart what a terrible pain I would rather die — Sentimiento de dolor, Antonio Aguilar.

So I would like to repeat here what has already been said by David Morris (1991: 14, quoted in Lascaratou et al. 2008: 3), but also, in different phrasing, by many other researchers (see: Fabrega and Tyma 1976: 323–324; Frijda et al. 1995: 125; Hinton 2012: 323; Wierzbicka 2014: 27; also Shweder 2008), that pain experience is “always saturated with the visible or invisible imprint of specific human cultures,” and we should never take it for granted.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Anna Wierzbicka and Cliff Goddard for their invaluable comments on this chapter. I am also indebted to an anonymous reviewer for all the comments that helped me to improve the final draft.

References Besemeres, M. (2011). Emotions in bilingual life narratives. In V. Cook & B. Bassetti (Eds.), Language and bilingual cognition (pp. 479–506). New York: Psychology Press. Bułat Silva, Z. (2011). El dolor y el tango [Dolor and tango]. Estudios Hispánicos, XIX, 27–37. Bułat Silva, Z. (2012). Spanish pain, el dolor. In P. Chruszczewski (Ed.), Languages in contact 2011 (pp. 61–71). Wrocław: Wydawnictwo WSF. Biblia Reina-Valera. (1960). Sociedades Bíblicas Unidas. = [BRV] Biblia Versión Popular. (1992). Sociedades Bíblicas Unidas. = [BVP] Carvajal, C. S., & Horwood, J. (2009). Concise Oxford Spanish Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chojnacka-Kuraś, M. (2012). Czy wyrażenia ból głowy i ból rozstania odsyłają do tego samego pojęcia ‘bólu’? [Do expressions ból głowy and ból rozstania refer to the same concept of ‘pain’?]. In A. Mikołajczuk & K. Waszakowa (Eds.), Odkrywanie znaczeń w języku (pp. 170– 186). Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego.

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Elpidio, A. (2011). Lista de sentimientos. http://www.alfonsoelpidio.com/blog/lista-de-sentimientos/ [13.01.2016] Fabrega, H., & Tyma, S. (1976). Culture, language and the shaping of illness: An illustration based on pain. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 20, 323–337.  doi:  10.1016/0022-3999(76)90084-2

Frijda, N. H., Markam, S., Sato, K., & Wiers, R. (1995). Emotions and emotion words. In J. A. Russell, J. M. Fernández-Dols, A. S. R. Manstead & J. C. Wellenkamp (Eds.), Everyday conceptions of emotion: An introduction to the psychology, anthropology, and linguistics of emotion (pp. 121–143). Dordrecht/Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers.  doi:  10.1007/978-94-015-8484-5_7

Gran Diccionario de la Lengua Española. (1995). Madrid: SGEL. = [GDLE] Hinton, D. E. (2012). Pain’s description: Beginning grammar and biological philology. Emotion Review, 4(3), 322–323. ​doi: 10.1177/1754073912439768 Goddard, C., & Wierzbicka, A. (2014). Words and meanings: Lexical semantics across domains, languages and cultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lascaratou, C., Despotopoulou, A., & Ifantidou, E. (2008). Tracking pain and joy: Breaching boundaries, bridging fields. In C. Lascaratou, A. Despotopoulou & E. Ifantidou (Eds.), Reconstructing pain and joy (pp. 1–14). Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. LeVine, S. (1993). Dolor y alegria. Women and social change in urban Mexico. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Moliner, M. (2007). Diccionario de uso del español. 3rd Edition. Madrid: Gredos. Morris, D. B. (1991). The culture of pain. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nasio, J. D. (2004). The book of love and pain. Albany: State University of New York Press. Perlin, O. (2002). Wielki słownik polsko-hiszpański. Warszawa: Wiedza Powszechna. Real Academia Española: Banco de datos (CREA) [on-line]. Corpus de referencia del español actual. http://www.rae.es [31.01.2014] Seco, M., Andrés, O., & Ramos, G. (1999). Diccionario del español actual. Madrid: Aguilar. Shweder, R. A. (2008). The cultural psychology of suffering: The many meanings of health in Orissa, India (and elsewhere). Ethos, 36, 60–77. ​doi: 10.1111/j.1548-1352.2008.00004.x Smith, J. A., & Osborn, M. (2007). Pain as an assault on the self: An interpretative phenomenological analysis of the psychological impact of chronic benign low back pain. Psychology and Health, 22(5), 517–534. ​doi: 10.1080/14768320600941756 Travis, C. E. (2006). The communicative realization of confianza and calor humano in Colombian Spanish. In C. Goddard (Ed.). Ethnopragmatics: Understanding discourse in cultural context (pp. 199–229). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. VOX. (2007). Diccionario Manual de la Lengua Española. Barcelona: Larousse. Wasikowski, J. M. (2012). Los siete dolores y gozos de la vida de San José. S.L.: Wasikowski. Wierzbicka, A. (2012). Is ‘pain’ a human universal? Conceptualization of ‘pain’ in English, French and Polish. Colloquia Communia, 1(92), 29–53. Wierzbicka, A. (2014). Imprisoned in English: The hazards of English as a default language. New York: Oxford University Press. Word Reference. (2013). http://www.wordreference.com [28.01.2014] Wordsworth Spanish Dictionary. (1991). Ware: Wordsworth. Zubieta, E., Fernández, I., Vergara, A. I., Martínez, M. D., & Candia, L. (1998). Cultura y emoción en América [Culture and emotion in America]. Boletín de Psicologia, 61, 65–89.

The semantics and morphosyntax of tare “hurt/pain” in Koromu (PNG) Verbal and nominal constructions Carol Priestley

Griffith University*

This chapter examines the words and constructions that Koromu speakers (PNG) use to talk about tare ‘hurt/pain’ and other painful sensations. It also reflects on links to cultural and environmental influences in daily life and key life events, environmental knowledge and traditional health care. Terms such as warike ‘be/feel bad’, tare ‘hurt/pain’, perere ‘hurt: sting, cut, burn’, and kaho ‘ache: burn, pierce’ are used in different constructions with varying emphases. These constructions are among the most typologically interesting in Koromu grammar. They are related to, but also distinct from, constructions found in other Papuan languages. They include experiencer object constructions, serial verb constructions with the grammaticized valency-increasing verb here/he put, and nominal constructions with, or without, prominent noun-phrase marking. Keywords: pain, Papuan languages, experiencer object constructions, serial verb constructions, prominent noun-phrase marking, Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM)

Koromu (Kesawai) is one of the many languages spoken in the middle Ramu Valley, Madang Province, Papua New Guinea. In a land of linguistic diversity, Koromu is one of the thirty or so Rai Coast languages (Z’graggen 1975, 1980; Ross 2000) in the Madang subgroup of the Trans New Guinea (TNG) family. There are approximately 100 Madang languages (Pawley 2006: 1) amongst over 400 TNG languages (Pawley 2005: 67). The TNG languages are part of a cluster of approximately 700– 800 languages between Timor and the Solomon Islands that are not Austronesian languages. Although these non-Austronesian languages are not a genetic entity, they are often referred to as Papuan languages (cf. Pawley 2005; Ross 2005). *  The author is also a Honorary Lecturer of the School of Culture, History and Language, Australian National University. doi 10.1075/bct.84.07pri 2016 © John Benjamins Publishing Company

124 Carol Priestley

The language data in this study comes from narrative, procedural accounts, conversation, and other genres collected while living in a Koromu village in 1975–76, 1978–80 and 1986, during fieldwork in 2000 and 2004 for my MA and PhD research, and during short field visits in 2010 and 2012. In my early years in Koromu, my understanding of the language of “pain” was enhanced as I observed and participated in local life, kept linguistic and ethnographic records, and provided medical and community aid. To describe bodily symptoms of discomfort, hurt, or pain, Koromu speakers use terms such as warike ‘be/feel bad’, tare ‘hurts/pains’, perere ‘hurts: stings, cuts, burns’, kaho ‘aches: burns, pierces’, hetakeri ‘pounds/pumps’, kututu ‘throbs’, mamaru ‘pains (in head)’, and nere ‘itch’. In this study I examine warike, tare, perere, and kaho in various verbal and nominal constructions that are amongst the most typologically interesting structures in Koromu grammar. These constructions include impersonal experiencer object constructions, serial verb constructions with grammaticized verbs, and nominal constructions with or without prominent noun phrase marking. These words and constructions throw light on cultural and environmental influences on daily life, as well as aspects of key life events, for example coming-of-age, and their accompanying rituals. Subsequent sections include background on describing the meaning of hurtand pain-like expressions, a sketch of relevant aspects of Koromu grammar, sections on the words warike ‘be/feel bad’, tare ‘hurt/pain’, perere ‘hurt: sting/cut/burn’, and kaho ‘ache: burn/pierce/throb (from heat or piercing)’, a section on cultural attitudes to tare ‘hurt/pain’, and concluding remarks. Each of the Koromu terms is examined in the context of the grammatical constructions in which they occur (cf. Priestley 2008/2009, forthcoming). Their diverse components of meaning are captured using explications expressed in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (Goddard & Wierzbicka 2002). 1. Describing the meaning of hurt-like and pain-like expressions “Pain is a largely subjective experience and one which is difficult to convey to others, and relies significantly on language to be communicated” (Strong et al. 2009: 86). In medical contexts there are a number of approaches to the challenge involved in describing pain. In some cases patients are asked to evaluate their pain on a scale from 1 to 10. However, this can be difficult and where comparison is needed, different people and different cultures may evaluate pain at different levels. Medical practitioners also sometimes use questionnaires such as Melzack’s McGill Pain Questionnaire (1975). While attempts have been made to translate questionnaires of this type into other languages, translation of the language-specific



The semantics and morphosyntax of tare “hurt/pain” in Koromu (PNG) 125

concepts involved is difficult and can result in miscommunication (Ketovuori & Pöntinen 1981: 252). Kyung-Joo Yoon reports on her personal difficulties with this in Australia where she found herself having to describe pain in English after always having described it in Korean. “The categorization of physical pains and aches is language-specific. One cannot necessarily find the same category of pain in different languages” (Yoon 2007: 119). As Goddard and Wierzbicka (2014: 127) put it: “different ways of thinking about pain, linked with different languages and cultures, colour the way people of different linguistic and cultural backgrounds speak about and express their pain…”. Studies of this semantic domain by linguists and/or anthropologists include: Fabrega and Tyma (1976a, 1976b) on English, Thai and Japanese, Lascaratou (2008) on Greek, Patharakorn (2010) on Thai, and Goddard and Wierzbicka (2014) on English, Pitjantjatjara/Yankunyjatjara, French, Polish, and Russian. The latter study presents a helpful set of questions for finding out about people’s feelings of pain using simple words and the English verb “hurt”. All of these studies highlight diversity of meanings related to “pain”/“hurt” and point to core characteristics of this semantic domain. These characteristics include: whether there are physical and/or psychological applications, identifiable locations (internally, externally or both), causes, intensity, and temporal factors (i.e. when something happened, duration etc.). In the present study, guided by Koromu data in context and the general characteristics of the domain, exponents of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage primes are used to propose components of meaning for each term. Exponents of the primes have been found in a cross-section of languages from major language families (see Goddard & Wierzbicka 2014) and the author has found exponents in Tok Pisin and Koromu as well (see Appendix 1). 2. Background on Koromu grammar Verbal clauses in Koromu consist minimally of an inflected verb. With transitive verbs there is an obligatory subject person-number suffix. This suffix is a portmanteau morph marked for both subject and future or non-future tense. Since non-future is the default tense, the glosses used here simply indicate person and number. If the object has an animate referent it is represented by an object suffix, unless the object is third person singular in which case there is no object suffix. Time at the moment of speaking, or earlier on the same day, can be indicated by the present tense suffix -re/-r, as in example (1) below, a statement uttered just after the event described occurred.

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(1) Usu ti-se-r-a. pig got-o1s-pres-3s1 ‘The pig got me.’ 

T6.5.20

Amongst the typologically interesting features of Koromu are impersonal experiencer object constructions (Priestley 2002a, 2002b, 2008/2009, forthcoming) and serial verb constructions involving grammaticized valency-changing verbs (Priestley 2002a, 2008/2009: 357–373, forthcoming). Both construction types are important areas of study in Papuan languages; cf. Pawley et al. (2000), Roberts (2001), Lane (2007), Pawley and Lane (1998), Pawley (2011). Words used to express pain/hurt-like feelings in Koromu can occur as the verb in impersonal experiencer object constructions or as the main verb in serial verb constructions with the grammaticized valency-increasing verb here/he put. In some cases words of the same form can occur as nouns, either in a subject NP or as the head of an instrumental postpositional phrase. Impersonal experiencer and serial verb constructions are introduced below, with the experiencer object verb warike ‘be/feel bad’. The nominal constructions are introduced in later sections. 3. Warike ‘feel bad’ The morphosyntax, semantics, and cultural importance of experiencer object constructions and of serial verb constructions with grammaticized verbs are introduced here with the verb warike ‘be/feel bad’.2 In an experiencer object construction warike can be inflected by an object suffix that refers to the experiencer and a subject suffix that has an impersonal, dummy referent. These constructions are commonly used to express what one ‘feels’. In example (2), the verbs warike ‘feel bad’ and sepa ‘feel ill’ both occur in this type of construction (Priestley 2008/2009: 403–423/forthcoming). There is no exact way of translating these expressions into English. This is illustrated in the gloss for (2), where I give the natural English translation and then an alternative translation with the experiencer as the object. This difficulty with translation is one reasons it is valuable to propose reductive paraphrase explications that are expressed in the simplest possible terms.

1.  Constructions with here/he-put can express phasal/valency-increase and/or perfective aspect. With constructions expressing tare and related sensations, the valency-increasing sense is used. 2.  There is a related adjective warikau ‘bad’.



(2)

The semantics and morphosyntax of tare “hurt/pain” in Koromu (PNG) 127

Sepa-se-r-a. U te, warike-se-r-a. ill-o1s-pres-3s that ins be/feel.bad-o1s-pres-3s ‘I feel ill. Because of that, I feel something bad.’ ‘Illness affects me. Because of that, it feels bad to me.’ 

T1.15.9

Koromu experiencer object constructions such as these indicate that the experiencer is not in control of the feeling. This is not an uncommon phenomenon cross-linguistically. For example, in Russian experiencers commonly appear in the dative case, i.e. ‘to me it’s cold’ (Wierzbicka 1999: 303–304), and in English we can say It feels bad to me. However, in English, speakers also commonly present the experiencer in the subject role, as in I feel bad. In Koromu there is an emphasis on something/someone causing the experiencer to feel something bad. For example, historically, and in some cases today, illnesses and other types of suffering are attributed to sorcery or other third party influences. Experiencer object constructions may include an adjunct locus NP, such as oru ‘insides’, which represents the affected part of the body. It also represents ‘feel’. The following example (3) can be used to refer to a general internal physical discomfort, e.g. indigestion, or to psychological distress (cf. Priestley 2002b: 250). (3) Oru mai warike-se-r-a. insides p1s be/feel.bad-o1s-pres-3s ‘I feel something bad/it’s bad to me in my insides.’ 

D7.46a.5

Although some experiencer object constructions represent involuntary or uncontrolled processes, the match between the syntax and semantics is not always clearcut. Thus, in Priestley (2008/2009: 404–420, forthcoming). I propose a number of subcategories of this construction; cf. Pawley (2000: 157) on Kalam. One complex area is the matter of the referent of the subject suffix. Many of the tests for subject-hood are not possible with these constructions. However, there are tests that indicate that the body-part NPs are adjuncts rather than subjects. For example, these NPs cannot be expanded into full NPs, and in most cases the negative particle tai occurs before, rather than after, the noun, so that the NP is closer to the verb. In contrast, in other verbal clauses the negative particle is closer to the verb. Furthermore, in some constructions, for example with perere ‘hurts: stings’ (see Section 5), there is a stimulus NP as well as a locus NP. In this case the stimulus NP is the subject. Using semantic primes, explication [A] represents the meaning of an impersonal experiential construction with warike ‘be/feel bad’. Since expressions about feeling bad or about painful sensations are often in the first-person, this explication and the others in this chapter are based on a first-person singular experiencer.

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[A] [oru mai] warike-se-r-a ‘I feel something bad (in my insides)’ a. something is happening to me b. because of this, I feel something bad c. I feel like someone can feel when it is like this:   something bad is happening inside this someone’s body   this someone feels something bad inside the body because of this d. I don’t want this

Basically this expression can be summed up as ‘I feel something bad (in my insides).’ However, the full explication presents a number of key elements. The first component ‘something is happening to me’ is the basic frame for experiencer object constructions. The second component sums up the evaluative content, i.e. whether the construction refers to a feeling that is good, bad, not good and so on. The third to fifth lines allow that this feeling can be either physical or psychological, but that physically-based feelings are a prototype (cf. Wierzbicka this volume). The verb warike ‘bad’ can also occur in a grammaticized serial verb construction with the valency-increasing serial verb here put, as in example (4). In this case the valency increase means that the subject suffix refers to an agent (Priestley 2008/2009: 362–365). (4) …warike he-seka-pe, u-e. bad put-o1p-sr do-3p ‘… (they) caused us harm, they did.’ (lit. ‘They did bad to us’) 

T5.23.34

In semantic primes, the core component of this grammaticized serial verb construction can be expressed as ‘someone does something bad to someone else’. 4. Tare: ‘hurt/pain’ The word tare ‘hurt/pain’ can be used to represent a physical feeling that lasts for either a short or a long time. As a verb, it can occur in an impersonal experiencer object construction where the experiencer is indicated by the object suffix, as in (5). In these constructions an object NP is optional, as shown in (6). (5) Tare-ne-r-a hurt-o2s-pres-3s ‘It’s hurting you.’  (6) (I) tare-se-r-a! 1s hurt-o1s-pres-3s ‘(I), it’s hurting me!’ 

Dict71

D1.160.1



The semantics and morphosyntax of tare “hurt/pain” in Koromu (PNG) 129

Fabrega and Tyma (1976b: 328–329) suggest that representation of a feeling with a verb implies “a condition which is conceived as active and dynamic”, i.e. as something that is happening directly. While tare ‘hurt’ is a dynamic process here, as in English It hurts!” (Goddard & Wierzbicka 2014: 138, 140, 154), there is not an agentive subject. However, there is an implicit reference to a process happening to part of someone’s body. Thus, Koromu constructions of this type can include a locus NP that identifies the internal or external body-part or condition, as in example (7). (7) Ahare tare-r-a. ear hurt-pres-3s ‘It’s hurting her ear.’ (Note: There is no object suffix for O3s)

D1.8.23

The component ‘something bad happened to this part of the body a short time before’ is an essential component in the explication for English hurt (Goddard & Wierzbicka 2014: 140). In Koromu the internal or external cause of tare can be expressed in an earlier clause, as in (8). In this example the initial clause has a final suffix (DR) indicating a different referent in the next clause. (8) Ehi aone-r-i-te ehi tare-ne-r-a. Toho t-ae. leg bend-pres-2s-dr leg hurt-o1s-pres-3s stretch get-imp2s ‘You’re bending the leg, and it hurts you, in the leg. Stretch it.’ 

D8.11.8

Although the feeling of tare ‘hurt’ can last for some time, like English ache (cf. Goddard & Wierzbicka 2014: 140), and although the immediately preceding cause of this feeling may only be mentioned earlier in the discourse, translations with English ‘hurt’ seem to work better than ‘ache’ or ‘pain’. This reflects the fact that the experiencer object construction with tare can refer to a brief experience. Also, a preceding cause can be identified within the discourse context, as in (9). (9) Ehi mei tare-se-r-a=mo. Rusia! leg p1s hurt-o1s-pres-3s=bm Ruth ‘Ruth. It’s hurting my leg!’ (Telling someone to stop hurting you.) 

D1.3.18

When giving medical aid in Koromu villages, I often heard people use this construction when describing their pain. It has the most general application of all the constructions discussed here. Although people didn’t make a fuss about feeling tare, they found ways to relieve it if they could. An example is (10), a comment from a patient who came to the aid post for help. (10) Weri tare-s-a-te ka-r-i. ulcer hurt-o1s-3s-dr come-pres-1s ‘The ulcer, it hurt me so I came.’ 

D3.121.9

130 Carol Priestley

In an experiencer object construction with tare ‘hurt’ it is appropriate to say that ‘I don’t want this’ is a component of the basic meaning. In order to indicate that something hurts a great deal, the adverb arenepate can be added to the clause, as in (11). For this reason in a basic explication of tare ‘hurt’ it is not necessary to say that someone feels ‘very bad’. (11) Wapi mei arenepate tare-se-r-a=mo. hand poss1s greatly hurt-o1s-pres-3s=bm ‘My hand, it hurts me a lot/greatly.’ 

D7.67.3

The use of an impersonal experiencer object construction suggests an initial framing component that includes the concept ‘something is happening to someone’. This indicates that the event is something beyond the person’s control. With tare it is something happening to a part of the body at a particular time. On the basis of these factors, the following explication [B] is proposed for tare. The complexity of writing explications and the need for further checking in the field are illustrated here. For example, although in the Koromu version of [BB] d. metake mai with warikesera literally means ‘my body feels bad’ this phrase is most commonly used to say that you don’t want to do something, so it is not a very natural statement when it incorporates ‘part of the body’. Thus, while the proposed explications illustrate the possibilities, they are at this stage tentative, particularly in their Tok Pisin and Koromu versions. [B] Semantic explication for tare-se-r-a [English version] a. something is happening to me b. something bad is happening to a part of my body at this time c.   (because something bad happened to it a short time before) d. I feel something bad in this part of my body, because of this e. I don’t want this

[BB1] Semantic explication for tare-se-r-a [Tok Pisin version] a. samtin i kamap long mi b. samtin nogut i kamap long wanpela hap long bodi bilong mi long dispela taim c.   (long wanem samtin nogut i kamap long dispela liklik taim bipo) d. mi pilim samtin nogut long dispela hap long bodi, long dispela e. mi no laikim dispela

[BB2] Semantic explication for tare-se-r-a [Koromu version] a. na i ahare aire-se-r-a=mo b. na warikau metake pa=mai aire-se-r-a=mo, apu morei c.   (surumapa mo pa na warikau aire-s-a=mo, u sei) d. mo pate, metake=mai warike-se-r-a, u seipa e. u maikoho-se-r-a=mo

The semantics and morphosyntax of tare “hurt/pain” in Koromu (PNG) 131



The verb tare ‘hurt’ can also be used in an active verbal context where the referent of the subject NP is an agentive participant who causes tare ‘hurt’. In this case the object suffix indicates the person on whose behalf the action is done (cf. Priestley 2008/2009: 113–117, forthcoming). The expression in (12) below is something like English ‘I’ve slaved myself to the bone for you’ (implying that you don’t seem to appreciate it). An explication for this agentive type of construction is given in [C] below. (12)

Wene here-pe te-nu-pu-r-i=mo. food cook-sr give-o2s-hab-pres-1s=bm Wapi tare-nu-pu-r-i=mo. hand hurt-o2s-hab-pres-1s=bm ‘I cook and give to you and because of this I hurt my hand for you.’ (lit. ‘I cook and give to you. I hurt my hand for you’).

[C] Tare with an agentive subject a. b. c. d. e.

I do something (because of this, something good happens to you) when I do this, I do something to a part of my body at the same time because of this, I feel something bad in this part of my body I feel something bad because of this

The verb tare ‘hurt’ can also occur in a serial verb construction as a main verb combined with the valency-increasing verb here put. See (13), where the bodypart NP wapi ‘hand’ is the subject (cf. Priestley in press). When tare combines with here put in this context, an explication such as [D] can be given. (13) Wene here-pe wapi tare he-se-r-a. food cook-sr hand hurt put-o1s-pres-3s ‘I cook and my hand hurts me.’

[D] Wapi tare he-se-r-a a. b. c.

I do something when I do this, part of my body does something at the same time because of this, I feel tare in this part of my body

Tare ‘hurt/pain’ can be used as a noun. When tare is an NP subject of a serial verb construction that combines warike ‘be bad’ with the grammaticized valency-increasing verb here/he put, an intense, destructive feeling is expressed. In this context tare is the cause of something bad happening to someone. For an example see (14). Prominent noun-phrase (PNP) marking confirms that tare is the subject NP (Priestley 2008/2009: 466–473, forthcoming). An explication for this construction is given in [E].

132 Carol Priestley

(14) Tare=te warike he-se-r-a. pain=pnp be.bad put-o1s-pres-3s ‘The pain was very bad to me.’ 

D11.10.6

[E] Tare warike he-se-r-a a. b. c.

tare is doing something bad to me now I feel something very bad in a part of my body because of this I can’t not think like this at this time: “I don’t want this”

The noun tare ‘hurt/pain’ can also be the object of the verb si ‘give (to a first-person recipient)’. The example in (15) is a translation of the words of one of the prisoners crucified with Jesus, recorded in the gospel of Luke. (15) Sono meiahete pao tare arene si-seka-r-e=mo. gen1p wrongdoing igen pain big give-o1p-pres-3p=bm ‘They give us great pain for our wrongdoing.’  Za4, Luke 23: 41

5. Perere ‘hurt: sting/cut/burn’ Perere is another verb that describes a type of hurt or pain. It can occur in an experiencer object construction with a suffix indicating the object experiencer, as in (16). The nearest English equivalents are verbs like sting, cut, and burn. (16) Perere-se-r-a. hurt:sting-o1s-pres-3s ‘It hurts/stings me.’ 

D1.116.6

Perere is one of several verbs that can occur in experiencer object constructions with both a stimulus NP and a body-part/locus NP (Priestley 2008/2009: 415–416, forthcoming). When both NPs occur, the stimulus NP cross-references the subject suffix of the verb. With perere the physical identifiable locus is generally a part of the body that has a surface which can be affected by some outside stimulus or effector; for example, tama ‘mouth’, mete ‘skin’, kamaho ‘shoulder’, or ehi ‘leg’; see (17). (17) Were=te kamaho perere-se-r-a. sun=pnp shoulder hurt: sting-o1s-pres-3s ‘The sun hurts/stings (my) shoulders.’ (…the stinging sensation of sunburn).  D7.68.6

A current or prior event triggers the negative bodily feeling (cf. English hurt and sore in Goddard and Wierzbicka 2014: 140). In example (18), the stimulus or effector is named in the first clause with an active verb construction.

The semantics and morphosyntax of tare “hurt/pain” in Koromu (PNG) 133



(18) Kirihi mete pa ho ho-se-r-a. U te perere-se-r-a. ant skin g/l bite put-o1s-pres-3s that ins hurt:sting-o1s-pres-3s ‘Ants bit my skin. That hurts/stings me.’  VF perere

Examples of effectors are ginger (in the mouth), insects, medicine or water (on a cut), knives and the sun (when it causes sunburn). In some cases the stimulus is indicated by an NP with the postposition te ‘instrumental’. For example, there is an instrument in the initial clause of (19). (19) Tike werane te wapi ton te-r-i-te perere-se-r-a=mo. knife small ins hand cut get-pres-1s-dr hurt: sting-o1s-pres-3s ‘I cut my hand with a knife and it stings me.’ (personal experience, VF perere.)

Examples show that an event which causes perere is recent and of fairly short duration. It has a damaging effect that is fairly intense. Sometimes there is a visible mark or redness of the flesh. The feeling of perere can be very severe in the case of large or deep wounds (cuts, bites, burns). But although it is an intense feeling, that people don’t normally want, it is not necessarily ‘very bad’, since examples also include mild sunburn, small cuts and small insect bites. As with English pain and Koromu warike, perere can be used for both physical and psychological sensations, as illustrated in (20). (20) Tamaite=te perere-se-r-a=mo. man=pnp hurt:sting-o1s-pres-3s ‘The man stings me.’ (This implies that his angry words sting.) 

VF perere

In (21) the psychological sense is associated with a locus NP, kame ‘the liver’. The locus NP can occur before the negative particle in this type of experiencer object construction. Here, although the object is the experiencer, there is a specific subject u sakine ‘that talk’. (21) U sakine kame tai pere-seka-r-a=mo. that talk liver neg hurt:sting-o1s-pres-3s=bm ‘That talk did not sting/pierce their livers/hearts’ (so they didn’t believe it).’  Za5, Luke 24:11

Because perere can refer to a psychological sense, explication [F] includes the component ‘like something can feel when something bad is happening to part of this someone’s body’ (cf. Goddard & Wierzbicka’s (2014: 154) model). [F] Perere-se-r-a a. b. c.

something bad is happening to me I feel something bad because of this I feel like someone can feel when it is like this:

134 Carol Priestley

  something bad happened to a part of this someone’s body a short time before   (because of this, this part of this someone’s body is not like it was before)   this someone feels something bad in this part of the body because of this d. I don’t want this

To express a very severe feeling, the noun perere ‘stinging pain’ can occur as subject NP in a serial verb construction with the verb warike ‘be/feel bad,’ combined with the valency-increasing verb here/he put, as in (22). The prominent noun phrase enclitic =te confirms that perere is a subject NP. An increased effect on the object is also indicated (Priestley 2008/2009: 357–374, forthcoming). An explication for this agentive verbal expression with perere as a subject NP is given in [G]. (22) Perere=te warike he-se-r-a. stinging.pain=pnp be/feel.bad put-o1s-pres-3s ‘The stinging pain caused me to feel (very) bad.’ 

D11.10.6

[G] Perere=te warike hesera

a. perere is doing something bad to me now b. I feel something very bad because of this c. I feel like someone can feel when it is like this:   something bad is happening to a part of this someone’s body   (because of this, this part of this someone’s body is not like it was before)   this someone feels something bad in this part of the body because of this d. I can’t not think like this at this time: “I don’t want this”

6. Kaho ‘ache: burn/pierce (from heat or splinter)’ The verb kaho is used to express a physical feeling of some duration. It can be used to describe feelings of pain based on being hot from being close to a fire or being out in the sun for a long time. It is a more persistent feeling than the sharp prickles of sun, or the initial pain of a cut, represented by perere. Since kaho includes this durational component I have chosen to use English ache for the gloss in examples such as (23) (cf. Goddard & Wierzbicka 2014: 140). However, this is not exactly the meaning and the whole construction is not translated easily with ‘ache’. (23) Were=te mete kaho-se-r-a. sun=pnp skin ache-o1s-pres-3s ‘The sun is hurting/aching my skin.’ 

VF kaho

Kaho can be used to refer to the steady ongoing pain from a splinter or thorn in part of the body (24).

The semantics and morphosyntax of tare “hurt/pain” in Koromu (PNG) 135



(24) Sahai=te oro ho-se-r-a. U te kaho-se-r-a. thorn=pnp pierce put-o1s-pres-3s that ins ache-o1s-pres-3s ‘A thorn pierced me. That causes me an ache (with that I ache).’ 

VF kaho

The locus NP may refer to a body-part, such as mete ‘skin’ or ehi ‘leg’, but it can also refer to the whole body. For example, in (25) a mother is telling her child that she can’t hold him on her lap because her body aches after a long day working in the sun. (25) Mete kaho-se-r-a. skin ache-o1s-pres-3s ‘(My) body is aching.’ 

VF kaho

Whether the situation is having too much sun, being too close to the fire, working a long time, or having a splinter, there are unifying components in the meaning. An event occurred at some time before the present. It may have been a short or long time before the moment of speaking, but the resultant feeling lasts for some time. See explication [H]. [H] Kaho-se-r-a

a. something is happening to me at this time b.   because something happened to a part of my body at some time before c. I feel something bad in this part of my body for some time because of this d. I don’t want this

The form kaho can also be used as a subject NP with a complex predicate consisting of the verb warike ‘be/feel bad’ combined with the valency-increasing verb here/he put, as in (26). The valency-increasing verb allows for a subject and also indicates an increased effect on the object (Priestley 2008/2009: 372–373, forthcoming). As a result this expression expresses an intense feeling of kaho. This intense feeling is explicated in [I]. (26) Kaho(=te) warike he-se-r-a. ache(=pnp) be/feel.bad put-o1s-pres-3s ‘The burning ache is very bad to me/is messing me up.’ 

[I] Kaho(=te) warike he-se-r-a a. b. c. d.

kaho is doing something bad to a part of my body at this time because something happened to me some time before I feel something very bad in this part of my body for some time I can’t not think like this at this time: “I don’t want this”

D11.9.11

136 Carol Priestley

7. Cultural attitudes to “pain” The Koromu words in the semantic domain of pain reflect cultural and environmental influences. In daily life physical pain often occurs in connection with everyday tasks of gardening, hunting, cooking, building, and so on. Psychological pain can occur in relationships with other people. However, while people generally don’t want to experience these kinds of pain, there are contexts where it is seen as part of something good. The positive value of pain is evident in traditional medicine. The verb perere ‘hurts: stings’ and the noun perere ‘pain: sting’ are related in form to the noun pere ‘stinging nettle’ (Laportea decumana, Laportea interrupta). This plant is a common counter-irritant in Papua New Guinea (Priestley 2012, 2013a). This is illustrated in example (27). After a python had constricted him, the protagonist returned home and was laid to rest on a bed of pere ‘stinging nettles’. (27)

…pere hoko te-pe, pere tauri ene her-e-te, nettle pick get-sr nettle on.top lay put-3pl-dr sepa arene ene ne t-a-te… illness big lay stay end-3s-dr ‘…they picked stinging nettle, laid him on top and he lay with a big illness…’  T1.14.17

The cultural importance of pain in health care was also made evident when I was involved in giving medical treatment in Kesawai and other nearby villages. Because it involved a painful piercing of the skin, antibiotic treatment by injection was much more popular than treatment with tablets. Men in particular, seemed to see the experience of having an injection as a show of stamina and endurance. Although I used techniques for reducing the pain they readied themselves for the event as though it would be very painful. They often brought someone with them to witness the injection and to support them in the experience, perhaps mirroring the support they gave to each other in coming-of-age rites. Women generally took having an injection more casually but also stoically. In either case adults were eager to have injections even before they saw the results. (Children found it more difficult, but see discussion below.) The use of pain in health care suggests a cultural script as follows [J]. [J] Tentative cultural script for the use of pain in Koromu health care a. [people think like this:] b. at many times it is like this:   someone feels something bad in the body because something bad is happening to it c.   because of this, someone does something else to this someone’s body   because of this, this someone feels something else bad in the body d.   some time after, this someone doesn’t feel something bad like this someone felt before e. it is good if it can be like this



The semantics and morphosyntax of tare “hurt/pain” in Koromu (PNG) 137

There are also experiences of pain in key stages of life and their accompanying rituals. Traditionally, coming of age in Koromu society was connected with painful experiences. Some of these painful experiences were built into stages of the initiation rituals that young men shared with their fellow age-mates. The ability to endure experiences that included pain, such as the letting of blood, was a valuable part of becoming an adult (cf. Priestley 2013b). Admiration for people who can endure pain extended to respect for leprosy sufferers who could pick hot food out of the fire.3 Two of the examples in this chapter come from texts about participants who suffered major injuries. These participants simply reported what had happened without any comment on the pain. Other narratives show that it is acceptable for people to laugh at someone experiencing a less painful accident such as falling in a rocky river (T1.13:14–18). These cultural attitudes suggest a cultural script [K] for valuing the ability to endure pain. [K] Tentative cultural script for the ability to experience and endure pain a. [people think like this:] b.   at many times when someone feels something bad in part of their body, c. it is good if this someone does not say many things about this d.   people think this is good

8. Concluding remarks There are many different stimuli in everyday life that can cause or contribute to experiences of pain. Koromu experiencer object constructions allow for impersonal subjects and for specifying stimuli as instruments or effectors of pain. Some of the stimuli that cause pain in Koromu are key elements in the environment to which people are exposed in everyday life while hunting, gardening, or gathering food and while building homes, fences, and gardens using local, natural materials. Examples of these environmental factors include the sun, splinters from plants, and tools used for everyday tasks. Other causes of pain and suffering that affect the body, particularly internal body parts, are associated in traditional Koromu culture with the work of unknown third parties, for example sorcerers. Whatever the effector or instrument causing pain might be, experiencer object constructions express the basic component ‘something is happening to me’. Examination of the various terms for expressing pain, in different verbal and nominal constructions, indicate that the feelings of tare ‘hurt/pain’, perere ‘hurt: 3.  Sadly, people who could do this did so because they felt no pain. As a result they were in danger of damaging their hands (cf. Brand & Yancy 1997).

138 Carol Priestley

sting, cut, burn’, kaho ‘ache: burn, pierce’, and warike ‘be/feel bad’ can be evaluated according to a range of core factors, including cause, instrument, temporal factors like duration, intensity, the location in the body, and whether there are physical and/or psychological applications. Variations in the components of meanings for different terms, and for the same root in different constructions, can be captured and compared in semantic explications. This diversity can also then be compared with diverse ways of talking about pain in other languages. A study of the terms used in natural discourse and everyday usage also helps to shed light on key cultural scripts that reflect a positive attitude to the ability to endure and benefit from some types of tare ‘hurt/pain’.

Abbreviations Glosses: bm Boundary Marking enclitic, dr Different Referent Realis, gen Genitive, g/l Goal/Locative, hab Habitual, igen Inanimate Genitive, imp Imperative, ins Instrument, neg Negative, o Object, p Plural, poss Possessive, pres Present tense-aspect suffix, pnp Prominent Noun Phrase, s Singular, sr Same Referent Close Succession. Sources: D Databook, DICT Dictionary, T Text, VF Verb File, Z Translation. Conventions: a hyphen (-) indicates a morpheme break, = indicates a clitic, and a verb gloss in small capitals indicates a grammaticized verb, e.g. here put.

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Appendix.  Exponents of semantic primes in English, Tok Pisin, Koromu – Primes exist as the meanings of lexical units (not at the level of lexemes). – Exponents may be words, bound morphemes, or phrasemes. They can be formally complex. – Exponents can have language-specific combinatorial variants (allolexes, indicated with ~). – There may be polysemy, e.g. Koromu nupu ‘all, many’, mene ‘be, live…’ – Each prime has well-specified syntactic (combinatorial) properties. – Primes, and sometimes with semantic molecules [m] (explicated elsewhere), combine in explications – Some combinations are expressed by portmanteau forms, e.g. Koromu ‘a long time before’ = su:rumapa, ‘a long time after’ = epo:no. English

Tok Pisin

Koromu (provisional)

i, you, someone, something~thing, people, body

mi, yu, wanpela, samting, manmeri, bodi

i, ne, ato, na~henatamaite (aharopu), substantives mete~metake

kind, part

kain, hap

tomtom (ma-), mo~asao~-ne

relational substantives

this, the same, other~else

dispela, wankain, narapela

mo, aterei2, tomo

determiners

one, two, some, all, much~many, little~few

wanpela, tupela, sampela, olgeta, planti, liklik

quantifiers

good, bad

gutpela, nogut

aterei1, aere, asa~ato pate, nupu1, nupu2, werai etamau, warikau

evaluators

big, small

bikpela, liklik

arene, werakahuno

descriptors

think, know, want, not want, feel, see, hear

tingting, save, laik, no laik~les bel~pilim, lukim, harim

u1~urunu, sipamu, urunu~-apesi, maikohu, oru~urunu, were, esere

say, words, true

tok1, tok2, tru

u2~sa, sakine, itini

mental predicates speech



The semantics and morphosyntax of tare “hurt/pain” in Koromu (PNG) 141

(continued) English

Tok Pisin

Koromu (provisional)

do, happen, move, touch

wokim, kamap, i go, i pas

haru, airi, motomoto, moto

action, events, movement, contact

be (somewhere), there is, be (someone/something), (is) mine

i stap, i stap, i, bilo mi

mene, mene, mene io

location, existence, specification, possession

ene~mene2, eme

life death

live, die

i stap (laip), dai

when~time, now, before, after, a long time, a short time, for some time, moment

wanem taim~taim, nau, bipo, bihain, longtaim tru, liklik taim, longtaim liklik, ?wanpela taim

enapu~oto ~sa, apu, surumapa, epono, -apaie,* suhupe,* oto atopate, apu morei

where~place, here, above, below, far, near, side, inside

we~ples, hia, antap, daunbilo, longwe, klostu, sait, insait

ani(pa)~sa, mo pa, naumpa, warisesa, aiake, waimesa, mesa, oru pa

space

not, maybe, can, because, if

no, ating, inap, long dispela, sapos

ia~tai, taumo, nauto, u seipa, uo

logical concepts

very, more

tumas, moa

herekani, apai

intensifier, augmentor

like

olsem

uapu~aiau

similarity

time

Index

A ache  88, 94, 110, 116, 124, 129, 134, 135 analogy  14, 57, 94 Anglo-culture  39, 40 Anglocentrism  3, 12, 19 anguish  68, 70, 71, 79, 80, 81n12 attachment  34, 75, 76 B back-translation  66, 66n1, 67 see also translation beatitude  76 belief  41, 72, 75 Bible  32, 115 biomedical  33 bodily feeling  8, 26, 57, 80, 81, 116, 132 bodily pain  27, 28, 39, 118 Buddhism  33, 34, 76 burn  101, 102, 124, 132, 134, 138 C Chinese SWB  67 Christianity  20, 34, 54 computer science  3 conceptual analysis  9 conceptual metaphor  113n5 consciousness  4, 25, 29, 41, 75 contrastive  78 corpus  32, 70, 71, 89, 112 Centre for Chinese Linguistics (CCL)  71, 85 Corpus de Referencia del Español  109n1 Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese (LCMC)  70 Leiden Weibo Corpus (LWC)  70 UCLA Written Chinese Corpora (UCLA2)  71 cross-cultural  2, 4, 42, 43

perspective  3 semantics  41 studies  33, 49, 66, 67, 82 cross-linguistic comparison  62, 69 evidence  26, 40 perspective  1, 13, 19 research  2, 69 studies  48 crying  20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 41 German  21 cultural scripts  10, 11, 11n5, 39, 40, 49 Danish  59, 60, 61 Koromu  136, 137 cultural analysis  3, 45 cultural anthropology  3, 8 cultural bias  68 cultural context  5, 16, 43, 62, 84, 86, 121 cultural diversity  2 cultural ethos  76, 82 cultural history  13 cultural model  5 cultural psychology  1, 8 cultural themes  3 culture-specific  11n5, 33, 56, 62, 74 culture-independent  74 D Danish happiness  46, 47, 48, 61 depression  28, 34, 56, 61 see also manic depressive illness discourse  English/Anglophone  20, 36, 48 biased  2 Danish  52, 57, 59 French  36, 38, 39, 116 global  3, 13, 47

local  47 media  46, 48 of happiness  20, 50, 61, 67, 68 Spanish  116 distress  34, 81, 127 duration  26, 39, 110, 125, 133, 134, 138 E economics  3 economic change  77 economist  65 emotion concepts  3, 6, 10 domains  4 expressions  90 research  4, 75 words  2, 4, 9 experience  2, 26, 27 meaning  2, 17, 112, 118, 118n, 119n12 pain  10, 13, 27, 81, 112, 115, 119 universals  41 English-specific words  2, 12 equivalence  36, 66n1, 67 see also translation ethnopragmatic  11, 45, 59 ethnopsychology  68 experiencer constructions  7, 14  explications  9, 10, 11 Buddhist concept (Pali) dukkha  35 Chinese tòngkǔ  80 Chinese xiào  23 Chinese xìngfú  74 Danish livsglæde  56 Danish livslyst  58, 59 Danish lykke  53 English crying  24, 25 English feels pain  10, 27, 115 English happiness  69 English happy  9, 69

144 Index English is suffering  30 English it hurts  111 English laughing  23 English suffering  35 French douleur  116 French mal  111 German weinen  25 Japanese chiku-chiku  100 Japanese gan-gan  104 Japanese hiri-hiri  102 Japanese kiri-kiri  96 Japanese shiku-shiku  98 Japanese zuki-zuki  94 Koromu haho  135 Koromu perere  133 Koromu tare  130 Koromu warike  128 Spanish dolor  119 Spanish me duele  111 exponents  5, 6, 7, 7n3, 69, 125, 140 see also semantic primes F family  28, 74, 76, 77, 82, 93 fatalistic  76, 77 fate  52, 76, 77 feeling bad  8, 10, 20, 25, 26, 28, 33, 35, 38, 40, 41, 56, 95, 113 good  20, 23, 24, 53, 59, 75 subjective  75, 119 see also bodily feeling, sensation folk knowledge  5 folk labels  4 folk psychology  40 folk theory  5 fortune  9, 51, 52, 76, Chinese  82 freedom  77, 82 G gender  83 global discourse  3, 13, 45, 47, 84 Greek, New Testament  31, 32, 125 Gross National Happiness (GNH)  67

H happy Are you happy?  69, 82 see also explication happiness concepts  14, 49, 61, 68, 82 discourse  50, 61, 67 framework  46 hoax  62 Journal of Happiness Studies  66 nations  66 paradigm  46 psychology of  66 science of  15 studies  14, 47, 49, 62 see also explication happiness-like concepts  67 health care  92, 136 human experience  3, 19, 41, 81 human universals  21, 22, 26, 27, 29, 33, 40, 43 hurt  88, 89, 92, 110, 110n2, 116, 117, 118, 119, 124, 125, 126, 130, 131 it hurts  103, 110, 111, 118, 129, 130, 132 I illness  27, 28, 112, 127, 136 see also medical individual freedom  77, 82 insider perspective  11 insider view  51 interpersonal relationships  17, 72, 77 it hurts  103, 110, 111, 118, 129, 130, 132 L language-specific  5, 14, 88n1, 124, 125, 140 laughing  20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 41, 137 Chinese  21, 22, 23, 24 German  20 lexical semantics  121, 138 life satisfaction  77, 78, 83 life dissatisfaction  61 linguistic labels  4 love  7n3, 50, 76, 77, 82, 113, 120 luck  9, 51, 52, 72, 76 Luther  54, 54n2 Lutheran  54, 56

M manic depressive illness  27, 28 marriage  76, 77 media discourse  46,48 medical  3, 33, 88, 100, 104, 124, 129, 136 see biomedical  33 medical science  3 medicine  95, 133, 136 mental pain  20, 27, 28, 78, 80 metaphor  98, 105, 113n5 metaphorical  4, 87, 104, 113, 117, 118 N National Happiness Index (NHI)  67 native concepts  68 Natural Semantic Metalanguage  3, 5, 7, 69, 74, 124, 125 See also NSM New Testament  14, 31, 42 NSM  3, 5, 6n2, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 69, 75, 89 P pain see mental pain, physical pain, psychological pain pain talk  88 pain-like  5, 32, 124 Papuan languages  123, 126 paraphrase  11, 91, 126 phenomenology  15 philosophy  3, 14, 54, 65, 76n10 physical pain  10, 20, 27, 36, 79, 80, 111, 112, 117, 118, 119, 136 pierce  89, 134, 135 pleasure  22, 54, 56, 116 political philosophy  3 polysemous  9, 27 polysemy  5, 28, 51, 119, 140 positive psychology  15, 46n1 pragmatic  52, 60, 61, 105 Protestant  55 Protestantism  54 prototype  28, 38, 39, 80, 119, 128 prototypical cognitive scenario  3, 10, 55, 58, 75, 119 prototypical scenario  29 prototypical thoughts  10 pseudo-universals  19, 41 psychiatry  34, 42

Index 145

psychological pain  27, 28, 93, 94, 136 psychomimes  15, 88, 89, 89n3, 90, 90n4, 91 pursuit of happiness  48, 77 Q questionnaire  49, 66, 67, 124 S self-report  2, 4, 66 semantic analysis  9, 11, 47, 69, 78, 92 semantic content  12n6, 15, 6 semantic primes  5, 6, 8, 140 semantic template  9, 104 semantic universal  2, 26

sensation  6, 9, 88, 91, 94, 101, 102, 126n2, 127, 133 smile  22, 23, 24, 53 sore  88, 100, 110, 116, 132 sound symbolism  87, 90 sting  89, 124, 132, 133, 136 subjective experience  49, 124 see also feeling subjective happiness  49 subjective well-being  2, 66, 83 SWB  66, 67, 67n2, 77 T tango  14, 112, 113, 113n4 tertium comparationis  8, 69 Tok Pisin  125, 130, 140 translation  2, 32, 34, 36, 46n1, 66, 66n1, 67, 68, 124, 126

U universal human concepts  19 V valency  8, 123, 126, 126n2, 128 values  46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 59, 60, 68, 75, 76 verbal happiness  49 vocalization  24, 25 W Warlpiri  22, 26, 33, 35 World Happiness Report  47, 66

In the fast-growing ields of happiness studies and pain research, which have attracted scholars from diverse disciplines including psychology, philosophy, medicine, and economics, this volume provides a muchneeded cross-linguistic perspective. It centres on the question of how much ways of talking and thinking about happiness and pain vary across cultures, and seeks to answer this question by empirically examining the core vocabulary pertaining to “happiness” and “pain” in many languages and in diferent religious and cultural traditions. The authors not only probe the precise meanings of the expressions in question, but also provide extensive cultural contextualization, showing how these meanings are truly cultural. Methodologically, while in full agreement with the view of many social scientists and economists that self-reports are the bedrock of happiness research, the volume presents a body of evidence highlighting the problem of translation and showing how local concepts of “happiness” and “pain” can be understood without an Anglo bias. The languages examined include (Mandarin) Chinese, Danish, English, French, German, Japanese, Koromu (a Papua New Guinean language), and Latin American Spanish. Originally published in International Journal of Language and Culture 1:2 (2014).

ISBN

978 90 272 4272 3

John Benjamins Publishing Company