A Comparative Study Of English And Chinese Emotion Metaphor Of Color Sources

Scholars both at home and abroad have made intensive research on metaphor and color metaphor, while only a few of them are about emotion metaphor of color sources. Most of the researches on color metaphor focus on analyzing the mapping of color sources onto various target domains but they generally ignore specific investigation into the mapping of color sources onto the target domain of emotion.In view of this, this paper, based on data from dictionaries and on-line corpora, makes a comparative study on emotion metaphor of six basic color sources between English and Chinese within the framework of conceptual metaphor theory. The aim is to improve and enrich the study on emotion metaphor of color sources from the perspective of conceptual metaphor.Here are the major findings. Firstly, the abstract concept of EMOTION is expressed by using a relatively concrete concept --- COLOR TERMS as sources of metaphors in realizing different emotion metaphor themes both in English and Chinese. Secondly, in the conceptualization of emotion using basic color terms, English and Chinese share many similar metaphor themes. In terms of different emotion metaphor themes, both English and Chinese have HAPPINESS IS WHITE/RED, SADNESS IS BLACK, ANGER IS BLACK/WHITE/RED/BLUE, FEAR IS WHITE, DEPRESSION IS YELLOW, EMBARRASSMENT IS RED. These similarities can be attributed to the common human perception and physiological reactions to different emotions. Thirdly, there also exist some differences. For example, RED is used metaphorically to express the emotion of ENVY in Chinese, while in English GREEN is employed. In Chinese, there are metaphor themes HAPPINESS IS YELLOW and SADNESS IS WHITE, while in English there are no such metaphors. Similarly, we can find the metaphor theme DEPRESSION IS BLUE in English, which does not exist in Chinese. Factors leading to such differences can be classified into five aspects:natural environment, customs, history, literature and religion.This research is of theoretical and practical significance. Through systematic investigation into emotion metaphor of color sources, it enriches the study on color metaphor and reinforces conceptual metaphor theory. In addition, this study has some illuminations for English learning, language translation and cross-cultural communication.