歡樂總是向上的嗎？——漢語的位移動詞與「歡樂」情感的表達

Is Happiness Always “Moving Up”?—Upward Movement and Motion Verb Representations in Chinese

語言中的位移動詞與所表達的情感存在一定的關係。這已在英語及諸多 歐洲語言的研究中得以證實 (Fussell 2002; Taylor and Mbense 1998)，例如 對英語與義大利語的量化研究 (Ponterotto 2014) 揭示了語言中用位移動詞 來表達情感的隱喻現象， 並說明這兩種印歐語言在動詞以隱喻擴展 (metaphorical extension) 來表達「歡樂」的情感上具有一定的局限性，僅涉 及某些特定動詞，這類動詞只具部分相似性，詞與詞之間的語義情感與內涵 仍存在差異。鑒於此類研究跨語言類型、跨文化的意義，本文在Ponterotto 研究基礎上，通過量化實驗並增加受試者、及增強考察英語與漢語位移動詞 與所引起的情感系聯，實驗結果表明漢語動詞所表達的「歡樂是向上的」， 然而英語和漢語中向上位移動詞與表達「歡樂」這一情感的相互關聯性，卻 有各自的複雜方面。

The HAPPINESS IS UP metaphor in linguistic expressions is widely explored in the studies of English (Kövecses 2015)， Chinese (Yu 1995， 1998)， and many other languages (Fussell 2002) across cultural and philosophical differences. The results of these studies call for further investigation on the subjective experience of happiness through embodied empirical studies of the motion verbs across different typologies of language families (Botha 2005， Goschler 2005， Ponterotto 2014). By taking a step further to conduct a comparative study of motion verbs regarding happiness representations， this article starts with a review of conceptual metaphors of emotions and happiness， and reports a study of correlation between happiness and upward motion， with a focus on Chinese and English verbs， and the characteristics of conceptualization between speakers of these two languages. Hypothesizing upward motion verbs are systematically linked with positive emotions， the author investigates 32 English native speakers' and 60 Chinese native speakers' perception on 28 motion verbs in both English and Chinese. By revealing the similarities and differences between these two languages， this study presents evidence to show that， in contrast to English and many other European languages， Chinese expression of happiness is associated more with fast and upward movements than conceptualized slow movements.