A Cognitive Approach To The Polysemy Of "Red" In Chinese And English

This paper attempts to provide a cognitive account of the polysemy of"red"in English and Chinese, with close attention to the semantic extensions of"red"in English and"红"in Chinese. Different senses of"red"and"红"were collected to serve as the corpus for this cross-cultural study.The two main mechanisms that motivate meaning extensions of color terms are metonymy and metaphor. This paper uses these two cognitive instruments to analyze the extended meanings of"red"in English and Chinese.Metonymical thinking is based on contiguity, and it provides the first step in meaning extension. Metaphorical thinking is based on similarity, and it offers an unlimited field for meaning extensions of color terms. Metonymy extends in chains, but metaphor is radial. To some extent, it is difficult to tell whether a particular semantic extension is metonymic or metaphorical, because it is frequently the result of their mutual operation, they are like points on a continuum.Other factors, like culture, history, and geography also influence the process of meaning extension of color terms. The syntactic roles of the lexical items"red"and"红"are compared. For the most part, we find that their syntactic roles are essentially the same. In general, polysemy is not merely a synchronic phenomenon; it is also the result of language change.