Comparative Study Of Color Terms In English And Chinese From The Cognitive Perspective

Every object in the world has its color. Therefore, a magnitude of color terms has appeared both in English and Chinese. Color, as an important aspect of human experience, has been explored by many linguists, but most of them are just describing the linguistic phenomenon rather than explaining the underlying cognitive mechanisms. Systematic and comprehensive explanations of motivations are still far from fetched.This thesis makes a comprehensive analysis and comparison between English and Chinese color terms from the cognitive perspective in the hope that it can help foreign language learners get clearer about the formational rules and meaning types and the modes of meaning change of English and Chinese color terms. The color terms appearing in this thesis come from 《英 汉大词典》 and 《汉语大词典》This thesis is focused on the analyses of formational features, modes of meaning change of English and Chinese color terms. A conclusion is reached that compounding, shifting and affixation are the most active ways to create color terms both in English and Chinese. Compounding is more important in Chinese than in English, while shifting is obviously more important in English than that in Chinese, and then followed affixation. This results closely from human idealized cognitive models, especially metonymy which maps the part-whole relation between entities within a domain and metaphor which maps two domains belong to two different superordinate experiential domains. The form of color words has a metonymic and metaphorical basis in cognition.The analysis of meaning extension of English and Chinese color terms is made according to the cognitive semantics, which examines all the color polysemants so as to account for the similarity and differences. These color polysemants consist of nine basic color terms, terms concerning basic colors,terms concerning objects and terms concerning both objects and colors. As a result, four features of the extended uses of color polysemants emerge naturally in English and Chinese. First, basic colors on the left of Berlin and Kay's implicational hierarchy (i.e., white, red, black, green, blue) prove to be more productive in creating metaphorical and metonymic uses than those on the right (yellow, purple, grey, brown, #). Second, color polysemants concerning white, red, and black also have more metaphorical and metonymic meanings than other terms concerning yellow, green and grey. Third, color polysemants concerning objects represent the specific colors of the objects as well as the character of the objects, which belong to the prototype of the corresponding category. Finally, color polysemants concerning both objects and colors exist only in Chinese. The similarities reflect the fact that the meaning extension both in English and Chinese is primarily rooted in common human bodily perception and similar cultural background. Meanwhile, there still exist great differences in other meaning extension. These differences are largely due to different bodily perception and broad cultural background.This thesis makes a relatively complete and detailed study of color terms, from the cognitive perspective instead of the traditional viewpoint of meaning and displays that there are both similarities and differences between English and Chinese color terms. English and Chinese are both among the widely used languages in the world. Theoretically and practically, it is of great significance to analyze and compare English and Chinese color terms comprehensively.