2025 Volume 21 Issue 2 Pages 35-52
This study examines laughter expressions and laughing subjects by investigating their usage in Japanese and Chinese novels, including their translations, and by conducting a consciousness survey of native speakers of both languages. The results indicate that in both languages, not only the laughter expressions but also the laughing subjects can evoke either positive or negative impressions to some extent. When the subject is the protagonist, both languages exhibit a contextual selection of various laughter expressions. However, when the subject is an important character other than the protagonist, the Japanese language distinguishes expressions based on whether the character is an ally or an adversary/nasty person, whereas no such distinction is observed in the Chinese language. These findings suggest that, whereas the Chinese language tends to focus on how one laughs in expression selection, the Japanese language places more emphasis on the laughing subject. Additionally, this study demonstrates that such tendencies are not limited to professional writers and translators but can similarly be observed among general native speakers.
