A Contrastive Study Of Metaphor In English And Chinese Non-Basic Colour Terms

Both the subjects of metaphors and colour terms were widely researched on by the researchers in the Western countries and in China as well. The earliest studies can be dated back to about two thousand years ago in the Greek times. The statements on these subjects in China also have a very long history. The cognitive interpretation of metaphors was initiated by Lakoff and Johnson with their influential book Metaphors We Live By. Ever since, metaphor has been a hot topic in the field of linguistics and many researchers have spelled their own contributions to it. As far as the colour terms are concerned, the linguistic studies on them in the real sense owe a lot to the basic colour theory proposed by Berlin and Kay. Seemingly, metaphor and colour terms are two independent topics. But increasing numbers of present researchers have found that they can be closely related and their relationship can promote the studies on both subjects at the same time. However, most of these researchers exclusively focus their attention on the metaphors in the basic colour terms. No research has been carried out systematically on the non-basic colour terms. Moreover, the contrastive studies on the colour terms between English and Chinese are few.Thus, this dissertation aims at revealing the similarities and differences of the metaphors in the non-basic colour terms between English and Chinese. Both the metaphors and colour terms have been dealt with throughout the dissertation. With the help of the related theories on metaphors and basic colour terms, the research mainly concerned two aspects. Firstly, the metaphors that utilized in the forming of non-basic colour terms were examined. During this process, the source domains of these metaphors were treated in particular. Secondly, the non-basic colour metaphors have been briefly worked on. Three methods were adopted to complete the whole project. They are questionnaires, the collection of the lexicalized colour terms from the dictionaries and the corpus research. Through these methods, the similarities and differences between English and Chinese metaphors in non-basic colour terms were explored. The research revealed that metaphor functioned a lot in the formation of non-basic colour terms both in English and Chinese. Moreover, some universal features exist in the source domains of the metaphors used in the forming of non-basic colour terms between English and Chinese. In the figures, the two groups of data showed great similarities in the source domains like plants, animals and human bodies. In this situation, the universal human physiological features and the natural environment take the responsibility. And in the domains like human interaction and chemical and industrial materials, some remarkable differences were found between the two groups of data. The unique features of each language and its...