The Motivation Of "Sadness" Sememes In Chinese

"Sadness" is one of the basic emotion category. And it is also a kind of sememe which is together with the words.After looking up three dictionaries, including, and, we find out all the words that have the sememes of "sadness", and then sum them up and classify, so as to study the motivation of "sadness" sememe in Chinese. After doing statistics, We get four kinds of sememe motivation in this paper: the motivation of by physiological sensation; the motivation of by body action; the motivation of character origin; and the motivation of by combination. And we also find some other motivation, the quantity of these words are so small that we sum them up and classify to one chapter called "the others". The motivation of by combination is the leading kind. And the formation time of these sememes are in accordance with the development current of the Chinese words. From the angle of semantic extention, the words that there original meaning is "sadness" is the great majority.