Lo spettro della felicità: corrispondenza lessicale ed equivalenza semantica

The problem of meaning is a main problem that has been approached in different ways in linguistics research. After a few reflections on the reason why lexical units often exhibit different semantic features in different languages, and some consideration on the phenomenon of synonymy, I undertake an investigation on a set of eight Chinese words wich have closely related meanings, voicing the concept ‘to be happy’. I analyse these lexical units by comparing and contrasting utterance samples, in order to point out their combinatorial and semantic properties, grammatical and syntactic features, and interchange possibilities. Thus I shed light on the different sense relations that exist between them and, at the same time, confirm the major role played by semantic features in determining lexical and grammatical co-occurrence restrictions. Lastly, I try to identify Italian lexemes which correspond most closely to the Chinese ones, so as to avoid, as far as possible, the semantic distortions that naturally occur in translating.