A Comparative Study Of Color Metaphors In English And Chinese

Metaphor is traditionally regarded as a figure of speech. Metaphor is used frequently in our daily life. With the development of research on metaphor, scholars gradually realize that metaphor is an important cognitive mechanism. Lakoff & Johnson (1980) argues that metaphor is a mapping from the source domain to the target domain. Metaphor as a cognitive mechanism is based on the physical experience. It exists not only in language but also in thought and action.Color terms are usually used to describe the colors of objects in the world. Scholars have made a lot of researches in this field and made some achievements. One of the great achievements is the theory of basic color terms proposed by Berlin and Kay.In both English and Chinese, the most frequently used color terms or the basic color terms are black and BLACK(黑), white and BAI(白), red and HONG(红), yellow and HUANG(黄), green and LV(绿), blue and LAN(蓝), brown and ZONG(棕), purple and ZI(紫), and gray and HUI(灰).From the appearance, metaphor and color terms are two independent topics. But in current studies, scholars have found that metaphor and color terms has a closely relationship between each other. So their relationship can promote the studies on both subjects at the same time.So this essay will focus on revealing the similarities and dissimilarities in the metaphors of basic color terms between English and Chinese. With the help of the related theories on metaphor and basic color terms, the research will be carried out by means of comparative study between English and Chinese. I will study the metaphorical meaning of basic color terms by analyzing the data collected from the two corpuses, namely, British National Corpus and the Center for Chinese Linguistics PKU.The research revealed that there are two possible reasons for the similarities of colour metaphor in the two languages. They are perceptual and cultural experience. The reasons for dissimilarities are environment, philosophy and religion.The comparative study on the metaphors of basic colour terms in English and Chinese has great applicable values in the learning of English and Chinese, especially for the English learners in China. It can enhance their learning of colour terms and overcome the obstacles in cross-cultural understanding. It's also beneficial for us to do English teaching and English translation.This thesis consists of five chapters. In the first chapter, I'll represent a brief introduction to this thesis. The second chapter looks back the developments in this field. The third Chapter aims to make a comparative study on metaphors of basic colour terms in English and Chinese, along with the process of data collection. The fourth Chapter tries to explain the reasons for the similarities and dissimilarities. The fifth Chapter gives us a conclusion of the research and underlines the significance of it. It also presents the limitations of this essay and gives some suggestions for the further study.