A Comparative Study Of Japanese And Chinese Emotional Expressions

Human beings are emotional. Happiness is the most important part of emotional expressions, which is expressed by different people and different nationalities. Because of different history, culture, language and custom, it is expressed by different way. This thesis is based on predecessors’research and collected words which express happiness form 《Emotion Express Dictionary》 and some of the literature. Investigated them by characteristic, form and syntactic, tried to find out similarities and differences of "happiness" between Chinese and Japanese.Words which express happiness can be clarified in to adjective, verb, noun and adverb. Through this study, we can define the followings:By form, there are 43 nouns,17 adverbs,14 verbs and 6 adjectives in Japanese. There are a lot of productive Chinese words, so there are more nouns. There are more verbs than adjective, because of verb suffixes. There are 59 adjectives,28nouns,16adverbs and 14 verbs in Chinese. There are more nouns and adjectives in Chinese. It’s made up of productive words "happy" and "pleased". It’s also multiple and repeatable. There are many mimetic words in Japanese. There are more adverbs in Chinese which express "happiness", and they are formed by "adjective+地". There are few mimetic words. There are many ABAB style adverbs in Japanese but AABB style in Chinese.By syntactic, the most significant characteristic is personal restriction. Everyone knows there is personal restriction in Japanese emotion adjective. I have found there is personal restriction in Japanese emotion verbs. Personal restriction can be expressed by tense and mood. There is personal restriction, not only because there are differences between subjective and objective but "viewpoint". Emotion words in Chinese are objective, not subjective. There isn’t any personal point, view of addresser. It’s objective and there isn’t any personal restriction. Characteristic change in Japanese emotion words follows changes in form, but position changes in Chinese.In general, we made clear similarities and differences of "happiness" between Chinese and Japanese through this study. So we can use emotion words properly in daily conversation.