A Contrasitve Study Of Attitudinal Meanings Of Color Words In English And Chinese Discourses

The vocabulary system of a nation could reflect its cultural value orientation in amost direct and sensitive manner. The color word, an indispensable part of humanbeing’s giant vocabulary system, pervades throughout every field of people’s life. Onthe one hand, the color word can be employed for the objective depiction for entities’color. On the other hand, the color word can serve as the best indication forwriters’/speakers’ emotional investment and subjective standpoint towards thetargeted person, entities and events.Owing to its inseparability with people’s daily life and its special usages, thecolor word has already been a hot target studied by several batches of scholars athome and abroad. Indeed, since two thousand years ago, those researchers have beenengaged in the researches on the color word and they distinguish from each other inthe selection of research perspective and research target. To sum up, the mostprominent and remarkable ones can be summarized as follows: the birth and evolutionof color words from the physiological perspective; the national diversity of colorwords from the anthropological perspective; the semantic connotation of color wordsfrom the linguistic perspective. Departing from Appraisal Theory, this thesis takes tothe research on the interpersonal meaning of color words.In the1990s, J. R. Martin advanced a lexically-based system for theinterpersonal meaning analysis——Appraisal Theory. It is an innovative theoryrooting in the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics. In the appraisal system,attitude sub-system occupies the most central position. It principally states howlanguage users express their standpoints and attitudes towards the target (entities,person and events in question) via the conscious or subconscious selection ofattitudinal resources. In the book The Language of Evaluation (2005), Martin andWhite probes into several typical explicit and implicit evaluative resources. Definitely,the connotative meaning of some lexical items, a less typical interpersonal resourcementioned by Halliday, was excluded from them. Here a puzzling question arises:How do those lexical items loaded with connotative meaning manifest theirinterpersonal values? Which special properties does such a non-typical interpersonalresource be equipped with?Departing from Appraisal Theory, the thesis launches a contrastive interpersonalanalysis on the color word which will activate connotative meanings under specificcontexts. The target color words in our research include red/红, black/黑, white/白,yellow/黄, green/绿, blue/蓝and purple/紫. Our Chinese linguistic data derives from Center for Chinese Linguistic PKU; whereas our English linguistic data stems from AModern Comprehensive English-Chinese Dictionary.In general, the thesis aims to answer the three key questions:(1) How does each target color word in Chinese and English embodyinterpersonal meanings (attitudinal meanings) under specific contexts?(2) By contrast with typical appraisal resources, what are the special propertiesof color words in concrete discourses?(3) What are the similarities and differences of the interpersonal meanings(attitudinal meanings) reflected by each target color word in Chinese and Englishdiscourses?In the section of data analysis, we deduce cultural meanings of color words underspecific contexts according to the principle of discourse coherence. In addition,cultural origin and metaphorical source of the target color words are properly recurredto.From the delicate data analysis, we may arrive at conclusions as below:(1) The process in which color words bring evaluative potential into full play isdetermined by culture to a large extent: different values of colors within differentcultures will result in different positioning of color words within the appraisal systemof different language system.(2) By contrast with typical evaluative resources, the evaluative meaning of colorwords is far more dependent on contexts, especially socio-cultural context; theevaluative potential of color words is more immense, for the same color word can beidentified as Affect, Judgement and Appreciation under different discoursal contexts;the evaluative uses of color words turn out to be less flexible and diversified in termsof sentence frame.(3) When it comes to similarities, the color words in both English and Chinesediscourses are capable of making Judgement and Appreciation. When it comes todifferences, we sum up three points. Firstly, the color words in English discourses areendowed with stronger evaluative power in that they could be the interpersonalresource of Affect. Secondly, the evaluative value encoded by some color word,positive or negative, is basically fixed under its own cultural background, but mayvary from culture to culture. The evaluative value of some color word in Englishdiscourses may be opposite to that in Chinese discourses. Thirdly, even if some pairof color words under different cultural contexts may happen to be with the sameevaluative value, the evaluative meaning of them scarcely bears something incommon.