A Comparative Study Of Color Metaphors In English And Chinese

The world we are living in is full of colors. Every object in the world has its own color. Therefore the magnitude of color terms has appeared both in English and Chinese. As a very important human experience, colors have attracted many scholars'attention. And color terms have been studied by the researchers both in China and Western countries. Nearly 2,500 years ago, the color was systematically studied for the first time in western countries. After that, many scholars studied color terms from different angles, such as philosophy, anthropology, ethnography, psychology, linguistics, sociolinguistics, etc. The study of color terms from linguistic aspect can be traced back to a sociolinguistic hypothesis proposed by Lakoff (1973) on the basis of cognitive study. Meanwhile, the study of metaphor has a long history. Up to now its most advanced theory is closely related to cognition. Colors, which can be cognized and perceived, was also studied by social-linguists from a cognitive perspective. When learning English, I find that while color metaphors used in different languages have something in common there exist differences in varied cultural contexts, which is worthy of study. Therefore, in this thesis a comparative study is made on the metaphorical usage of nine basic color terms in English and Chinese.The data collected in this thesis indicates a high frequency of the metaphorical usage of color terms. Moreover great efforts have been made on the exploration of the causes of the similarities and dissimilarities of color metaphors that are found in English and Chinese on the basis of cognitive and cultural studies.