A Contrastive Study Of The Subcategories Of English And Chinese Color Terms

Color terms, as the results of human perception, categorization and encoding withnatural language of color, are words and expressions denoting the color attributes of things,including hue, brightness and saturation and form a relatively independent yet dynamiclexical system of human language, which remain the research focus of philosophers,anthropologists, psychologists and linguists and one of the leading issues in the linguisticstudies of the day. Relevant studies have been carried out from different perspectives,yielding fruitful results, yet they also have some limitations. For example, when studying thecolor terms, western scholars tend to follow the theoretical paradigms of linguistic relativityand linguistic universality, taking such traditional anthropological and psychological methodsas naming and response time as their research methods, taking English as the metalanguageand object language, and basic color terms as their research focus, with no due attention paidto non-basic color terms—the subcategories of color terms, thus revealing just several aspectsof the many problems in the research of color terms. And when the Chinese scholars makecontrastive studies of English and Chinese color terms, they also focus on basic color termsrather than non-basic color terms, with little cross-language contrastive studies and nointerpretation of the inner semantic mechanism involved. Thus this dissertation conducts acontrastive study of the subcategories of English and Chinese color terms after a literaturereview of the previous studies of color terms home and abroad, aiming to answer thefollowing three research questions:1. What are the similarities and differences in the representation of the subcategories ofEnglish and Chinese color terms?2. What are the similarities and differences in the stylistic features of the subcategoriesof English and Chinese color terms?3. What are the similarities and differences in the cognitive mechanism of thesubcategories of English and Chinese color terms?The present research puts forward a cognitive semantic research model in the contrastivestudy of the subcategories of English and Chinese color terms based on the categorizationtheory and conceptual mapping theory of cognitive linguistics as well as the theory ofinstantiation in systemic functional grammar and takes as its research methodology thecombination of quantitative research and qualitative research as well as a contrastive analysis.The data used are taken from the questionaires, A Dictionary of Colour, the Online OxfordEnglish Dictionary, Modern Chinese Dictionary, Color Description Dictionary, Color Glossary of Modern Chinese, The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) andCorpus of Chinese Language (CCL). After sorting, classifying and analyzing the data, thepresent paper makes a contrastive study of the subcategories of English and Chinese colorterms and finds that the non-basic color terms, as subcategories of basic color terms, areformed in the cognitive process of transcategorization. There are both similarities anddifferences in terms of the representation, the stylistic features and the cognitive mechanismin English and Chinese color terms.It is found that there are four main types of non-basic colors in terms of themorphological structure in both English and Chinese: object color terms, proper noun colorterms, color terms denoting degree, color terms denoting mixed color. Yet, in terms of therepresentation forms, besides the common features shared by the two languages in theformation of object color terms, i.e. basic color terms and object names combined, basic colorterms and modifiers combined, there are more representation forms particularly in objectcolor terms and color terms denoting mixed color in English non-basic color terms, whilethere are also unique representation forms in Chinese non-basic color terms.It is also found that as the prototypes resulting from furthering cutting with basic colorterms as their cognitive prototypes, non-basic color terms have their unique semantic features,such as features of vagueness, figurative features and use in some special genres and inparticular contexts and so on. In addition, they serve such pragmatic functions as descriptivefunction and expressive function, which are the main reasons why they occur mostly inliterary works and the advertisements of car, clothing and decorating materials and suchelectronic products as mobile phones, and computers.In addition, it is found that the derivation of non-basic color terms is the cognitiveprocess of subcategorization, during which such cognitive means as metaphor, metonymy andconceptual integration are resorted to.Object color terms and most of the proper noun color terms are semantically motivatedwith ontological metaphor as its main mechanism?that is, they are formed on the basis ofontological metaphor. The source domains include the domains of plants, animals,minerals/metals, jewels, natural phenomena and human activities, of which the plant domainranks first in the color terms formed by object names and basic color terms combined.Besides, the choices of the source domains reveal the unique features in English and Chinese,as illustrated by English object color terms and proper noun color terms, in which the numberof non-basic color terms formed with names of place, chemical products and human activitiesas their main source domains is much larger than their Chinese counterparts, whereas interms of object color terms formed by object names and-colored combined, the plant domainof the Chinese color terms still ranks first, while in English there is no obvious distinction.Besides, people also take the users of a color and the names of relevant places as the vehicle to denote the color, such as Turkey red, Alice blue, Lincoln green, Macao green and navy blue,etc., which reveals from one aspect the improving of human cognitive capacity and theincreasing diversity of linguistic expressions.Besides, there are a large number of English object color terms and a few proper nouncolor terms which are metonymy-motivated. People often denote the relevant, salient colorswith the names of plants, animals, articles for use, chemical products and jewels by means ofmetonymy, of which the plant names rank first. People also associate the place where anevent takes place with the event or the place where an institution is located with theinstitution. For example, magenta is an Italian town, where the famous Magenta Battle tookplace in1859, coincidentally, the dye “??” was also found that year, thus people denote thedye with magenta, the name of the battle field, metonymically.Unlike the object color terms and proper noun color terms which are formedmetaphorically, the conveying of color concepts with the color terms formed metonymicallyhas totally gone beyond the color category, in which the names of entities is usedmetonymically to denote their salient colors. Such color terms are great in number accountingfor38.4%in the total number of English non-basic color terms. By contrast, there are only asmall number of such words in Chinese, accounting for only1.38%in Chinese non-basiccolor terms. And since these words are polysemous words, their use as color terms shouldhave contextual clues, otherwise, they are only names of objects. For example,“?” is agenus of birds in Chinese, only when it is used in such idioms as “????” and “????”, can it carry the meaning of “white”, otherwise, it is only a name of the bird in Chinese.The cognitive mechanism of English and Chinese color terms denoting degree isorientational metaphor. There are also in Chinese color terms denoting degree, the color termswhich are synesthetically motivated and which can be divided into four subcategories:synesthesia between color vision and audition, synesthesia between color vision and gustation,synesthesia between color vision and dermal sense and synesthesia between color vision andolfactory sense, which are formed by communicating between color vision and differentsenses, denoting not only information of color but also people's emotion of love and hatetowards the things described. By contrast, there are rarely such color terms formed in thisway in English except a few words such as “soft red”, which reveals the constraints of thelanguage systems on their language expressions.The cognitive mechanism of English and Chinese color terms denoting mixed colors isconceptual integration. Take the color term “blue-green” as an example. It is formed byintegrating the basic color terms “blue” and “green”, of which “blue” and “green” belong totwo different input spaces, with “blue” the color of the sky on a sunny day and “green” thecolor of grass and leaves when they are flourishing. The two components from the inputspaces form a new color concept “blue-green” through cross-space mapping, meaning a color with “blue” and “green” combined.In short, non-basic color terms are not only the products of the deepening of humancognition of color as well as the products of human transcategorization but also the groupconsensus, having great bearing on the ethnic culture. They directly reflect how a speechcommunity construes color experience as meaning, and this cognitive process is based oncategorization and subcategorization, revealing the unique thinking mode of an ethnic groupin getting to know things. The non-basic color terms have a close bearing not only on culturalcontexts but also on situational contexts. The similarities and differences reveal from oneaspect the different construing of color experiences in English and Chinese as well as theclose relation between linguistic categories?cognitive capacity and ethnic traditions.This research has both theoretical and practical significance.Firstly, this research applies the cognitive theories of categorization and conceptualmapping as well as the theory of instantiation in systemic functional grammar to thecontrastive study of the subcategories of English and Chinese color terms, which can broadenthe application scope of the relevant theories on the one hand, and deepens people'sunderstanding of these theories on the other hand.This research defines and systematically classifies non-basic color terms?brings forwardthe concept of proper noun color terms and puts forward the cognitive semantic researchmodel of the subcategories of color terms for the first time on the basis of previous studies,providing a unified theoretical framework for the categorization of different types ofvocabulary. This research also carries out a corpus-based contrastive study, with thecombined method of qualitative study and quantitative study of the subcategories of Englishand Chinese color terms in terms of their representation forms, stylistic features as well astheir cognitive mechanism for the first time, and tries to analyze the non-basic color termscomprehensively and systematically.The contrastive study of the subcategories of English and Chinese color terms revealsfrom one aspect the similarities and differences in the representation of color categories intwo different language as well as the different thinking modes of the two cultures, supportingto some extent the new interpretation of Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis by Levinson(1997;2003),namely, there is universality at the atomic level but differences at the molecular level inhuman languages, thus enriching people's understanding of human transcategorization anddeepening people's understanding of the relationship between linguistic categories andnon-linguistic thinking.Finally, the findings of the research into the similarities and differences of English andChinese color terms in terms of their representations, stylistic features as well as the cognitivemechanism will provide reference for teaching Chinese as a foreign language, Englishteaching, English-Chinese translation as well as dictionary compiling.