A Cognitive Semantic Analysis Of The Basic Color Terms In Chinese

The aim of the present MA thesis is to examine the semantics of the six basic color terms in Chinese, i.e., hei "BLACK", bai "WHITE", hong "RED", huang "YELLOW", lu/qing "GREEN", lan/qing "BLUE", so as to account for the motivated relations between the senses of a single word.The theoretical framework underlying my investigation is that of cognitive linguistics (Lakoff 1987; Langacker 1987), which "takes not the objective 'real world' but human perception and understanding of the world to be the basis for the structure of human language"(Sweetser 2002: 2), and which explains polysemy in terms of conceptual organization and categorization. It is along these cognitive lines that I attempt to explore the metaphorical and metonymic extensions of the six basic color words in Chinese, as a result of which four features of the extended uses of color words emerge naturally. First, the contradictory senses of one and the same color word can be found in the data I have studied. Second, the opposite semantic relations seem to exist between the different color words. Third, colors on the left of the Berlin and Kay's implicational hierarchy (i.e., BLACK, WHITE and RED) prove to be more productive in creating metaphorical uses than those on the right (i.e., YELLOW, GREEN and BLUE). Finally, the patterns of meaning extension of the Chinese color words can be both cross-linguistic and language-specific.This study provides the evidence that the cognitive approach to lexis as an array of semantic networks triggered by the words within them proves a powerful explanation in solving a number of troublesome issues in lexical semantics.