Study On Chinese Color Words

Color words are the cognition of color reflected in the language. Influenced by physiology, physiology and culture, color words reflect two aspects of the world, subjective world and the objective world. This paper explores the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic characteristics of Chinese color words with semantics and cognitive psychology. Color words in Chinese language have three types of grammar variants,including mono-type, poly-type, derived-type, mono-variant, poly-variant. Mono-type is the legacy of ancient Chinese language. Both poly-type and derived-type have their own special parts. Mono-variant and poly-variant are quite more in modern Chinese. There are differences between the variants in positive degree and comparative degree but no essential change in semantic meaning. Most color words in Chinese are polysemic that indicate meanings other than colors. It is noted that sememe should be regarded as the unit to compare color words with color-related words. Color-related words do not only refer to meanings other than colors and color words do not just indicate colors. The extraordinary collocations of color words always promote the appearance of the new meanings and general associated meanings. Social life and humans'thinking and language itself will have influence on the evolution of color terms. Some emerging meaning of the color words can reflect the change of the subjective world. Metaphorical mapping is the internal mechanism of the derivation of Chinese color words, which closely links various sememe of color words together. The metaphorical cognition style is the root of this situation. The comparison between color words in Chinese language and those in other languages are conducted under the framework of cognition, which is more helpful for us to abstractly generalize various superficial phenomena.