tailieunhanh - Báo cáo " Grammatical and semantic features of some adjectives denoting happiness - the feeling of pleasure "

The topic of happiness draws a lot of attention from different types of people. In fact, there are so many ways to express our happiness, one of which is employing words and idioms denoting happiness. In this article, the authors discuss five adjectives denoting happiness - the feeling of pleasure: “cheerful”, “gay”, “glad”, “merry” and “pleased” in terms of grammar and semantics. | VNU Journal of Science Foreign Languages 24 2008 157-166 Grammatical and semantic features of some adjectives denoting happiness - the feeling of pleasure Nguyen Thi Thanh Huong1 Nguyen Thi Van Lam2 1 Department of English - American Language and Culture College of Foreign Language Vietnam National University Hanoi 2 Department of Foreign Language Vinh University Received 29 February 2008 Abstract. The topic of happiness draws a lot of attention from different types of people. In fact there are so many ways to express our happiness one of which is employing words and idioms denoting happiness. In this article the authors discuss five adjectives denoting happiness - the feeling of pleasure cheerful gay glad merry and pleased in terms of grammar and semantics. Their grammatical features include syntactic functions and morphological features and the semantics includes lexical meaning synonyms antonyms collocations and idioms of which these words are a component. The authors finally provide some suggestions in the teaching and learning of as well as in the translation concerned with the words. 1. Introduction Linguistic items in English utilized to express happiness are numerous. As the feeling of happiness can range from the feeling of pleasure to that of great pleasure the English language is not poor in the expressions of the feeling. More concretely the feeling of happiness can be expressed by such adjectives denoting happiness as happy cheerful gay glad merry pleased delighted elated and jubilant . They are sub-classified on the basis of the degree of expression of pleasure they denote into two groups 1 happy Corresponding author. Tel. 84-4- 038 3555656 E-mail nguyenthivanlam@ cheerful gay glad merry and pleased denoting pleasure and 2 delighted elated and jubilant denoting great pleasure . In this article the adjectives denoting pleasure excluding happy shall be explored in terms of grammar including syntactic functions 1 and morphological features 2 and