A Study Of Semantic Evolutions And Usage Comparisons Between The Chinese Word "Bai" And The English Word "White"

The color terms are symbols used to describe colors. It resulted from man's cognitive capacity, categorization and encoding of the outer world. Researchers from various fields have been showing much interest in color terms in the past decades. Based upon the previous studies, the thesis firstly examines the semantic evolutions of the Chinese word "bai" and the English word "white" respectively from the diachronic perspective. Then it attempts to apply the relevant theories from cognitive linguistics to explain the causes and mechanism. With the aid of corpus, the thesis synchronically compares "bai" with "white" from collocations, semantic prosody, and their specific usages. The study suggests that:First, the main meanings of "bai" in modern Chinese originated from several different sources. But since some of the meanings were likely to cause ambiguity when in use, they were eventually discarded.Second, the main meanings of "white" in modern English were basically developed from the adjective "of a color like that of new snow or clean milk".Third, the corpus data reveals that "bai" has various kinds of meanings among which representing "the color of white" covers 21 percent of all the usages, but "white" relating to "the color of white" covers up to 63 percent.Forth, the corpus data also shows that there are more occasions on which both "bai" and "white" are used to express neutral meanings (in the probability of 54% and 40% respectively). In terms of "bai", the positive meanings are obviously less than the negative ones: the probability of the former is 12% while the latter 34%. However, in terms of "white", there is nearly no difference in the probability of positive and negative meanings (both are 30%). Comparatively speaking, the probability of positive meanings of "bai" is less than that of "white": the former is only 12% and the latter is 30%.Fifth, by comparing specific examples between "bai" and "white", we have found that their meanings that are basically equivalent are mostly related to the color itself. On the other hand, there are some non-correspondences between "bai" and "white". They are usually the collocations such as idioms, set phrases, colloquial expressions and the proper nouns such as the names of people, places, faculties, commodities, diseases, etc.