A Comparative Study Of Chinese And English Color Words In Metaphors And Metonymies

In the long history of metaphor study since Aristotle, metaphor has been viewed as a deviated use of words and expressions outside their normal, conventional meanings. Though several famous theories have emerged with the development of metaphor study, the status of metaphor has never been changed. The publication of Metaphors We Live By written by Lakoff and Johnson, brings a turning point of metaphor study and conceptual metaphor theory comes into being. Since then, metaphor is not a figure of speech, but a figure of thought. The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.As an important type of metaphor, color words metaphors refer to those usages in which color words are used metaphorically. In this way, people can think and comprehend other abstract and complicated concepts in terms of colors that they are quite familiar with.However, color words metaphors are somewhat neglected compared with spatial metaphors, emotion metaphors, love metaphors and time metaphors. Therefore, a systematic and comparative study of color words metaphors in Chinese and English is quite necessary.Thus through the analysis of the data from dictionaries and Internet, this dissertation discusses the similarities and differences of Chinese and English color words metaphors and metonymies, and points out the reasons. In this way, the dissertation aims to test and verify the universality and cultural variation of conceptual metaphor.There are five parts in this dissertation. Chapter One briefly introduces the purpose of the dissertation and provides a general overview of the main traditional theories and the contemporary conceptual metaphor theory, and presents the research background and research motives of the current color words metaphor study.Chapter Two gives an introduction of color words metaphors, and begins to...