Colors In Shakespeare

For centuries, most of the researchers believed metaphor was an important rhetoric device in literature. In the80s of the20th century, Lakoff proposed his conceptual metaphor theory, which aroused new subjects and discussions in language and thoughts. Lakoff’s conceptual metaphor believes that metaphor works not only as a method of rhetoric, but a way people think of and recognize the world as well. Metaphor is a basic phenomenon of human language and thought.There are two foundations of the thesis. First, the conceptual metaphor of Lakoff is the theoretical foundation; second, the corpus of the complete works of Shakespeare is the practical one. Lakoff claims in his conceptual metaphor theory that metaphor is a common phenomenon of human language. He points out that in our daily life we unconsciously and spontaneously use metaphors in one out of three sentences when we speak. The ubiquitous metaphor refers to the mapping relationship between two different cognitive domains. Human cognitive processes are from the easy and familiar substances or concepts to the complicated and strange ones. The processes of human cognition influence the mapping from the source domains which are familiar and easy to understand to the target domains which are unfamiliar and difficult to understand.As a reflection of entities absorbing different part of spectrum, color is an abstract concept. Except for air and water, nearly all of the substances in the nature have colors. The recognition of the color concepts must be realized by another cognitive domain. That makes the colors become the main source domain. The colors analyzed in the thesis comes for Berlin&Kay’s research, which proves that human languages have mutual understandings of the11basic colors terms. they are:white/black<red<green/yellow <blue<brown<purple/pink/orange/gray. The metaphorical foundations. metaphorical meanings and working mechanisms of all the11colors are discussed by means of Lakoff’s conceptual metaphor. After selecting all the contexts containing the11colors in the complete works of Shakespeare’s corpus, a comparative analysis of all the color metaphors produces comprehensive and particular original materials for the theoretical research of the thesis. In the complete works of Shakespeare nine colors have metaphorical meanings except for pink and orange. As a litterateur, dramatist and poet. Shakespeare is a master of metaphor, the most common language in his work expresses the basic metaphorical meaning. Aiming at integrating the conceptual metaphor and the color terms in Shakespeare’s works, the analysis of color metaphors in Shakespeare’s work is in light of Lakoff’s conceptual metaphor, based on which the usage of color terms and metaphorical process are explored and illuminated by65examples in Shakespeare’s works.The analysis of color metaphors based on conceptual metaphor results that:First, the working mechanism of color metaphor is not a simple mapping from the source domain to the target domain, there are mapping node in the process, the writer names the node as:Zero Node, One Node and Multi-node. Second, because colors are abstract concepts, the reorganization of colors depend on other entities and colors are changeable with the time and other situations, the source domains of the color metaphor can be divided into three parts: colors as the source domain, color entities as the source.domain and color chains as the source domain. Third, in the complete works of Shakespeare target domains could be traced out on the other side of the mapping, they are human/substance/emotions as the target domain, characters of entities and emotions of human as the target domain, and time and other abstract concepts as the target domain. The target domains are found out of the complete works of Shakespeare and the processes of mapping are analyzed in details.