A Comparative Study Of English "Blue" And Chinese "Lan" (蓝) Used In Metaphorical Expressions

It is widely acknowledged that numerous accomplishments have been achieved on metaphor in general and color metaphor in particular from the Ancient Greek time till now. This thesis reports on an investigation into the similarity and dissimilarity of"blue"metaphor between Chinese and English. On the basis of a historical review of the previous research on metaphor, color metaphor generally and blue metaphor in particular, a systematic and contrastive analysis of a wide range of data from both Chinese and English corpus has been carried out to examine the similarities and differences of the usage of"blue"metaphor in Chinese and English. The frequency of"blue"metaphor and frequently used metaphorical meaning of"blue"metaphor in English and Chinese are investigated by examining data collected from the two corpuses, British National Corpus and the Center for Chinese Linguistics PKU. Furthermore, data from various latest electronic newspapers and magazines is also analyzed in this paper.The empirical evidence of this research is, to some extent, consistent with the previous findings and it can be tentatively concluded as followed: 1) there exist differences in the tendency of"blue"in different genders (male prefers blue) and the frequency of"blue"in English and Chinese (the metaphorical meaning of"blue"has been used much more frequently in English than that in Chinese); 2) there are similarities in Chinese and English (e.g."blue"in both is associated with jobs, plans, important official paper and profit in economies) and dissimilarities in connotations and metaphorical meanings between"blue"in English and"Lan"in Chinese. Based on the statistical results of this study, possible reasons for the similarities of"blue"metaphor in the two languages are explored from the viewpoint of perception and culture; reasons for differences are discussed mainly from those perspectives of geographical environment, philosophy, Kandinsky's color theory, cultural identity as well. The last chapter is primarily to conclude the findings of the current thesis, to point out the limitations and to give suggestions for further research.