A Study On The Basic Color Words Of Mo Yan’s Novels

A color word is an important part of Chinese vocabulary system. The Basic color words have important research value because of their stability, productivity and popularity. Mo Yan, as the first ethnic Chinese writer who won the Nobel Prize for literature, the basic color words of his works have considerable value. We study the color words system of Mo Yan stories with the method of linguistics in-depth and systematically which aims to analyze its unique cultural meaning, pragmatic function and reveals the close relationship between language and culture. From the point of structure type of the basic color words in Mo Yan’s novels, the color words of the novels contain pure color word and synthetic color words, and synthetic color words also contains many different species. From the point of the usage of the basic color words in Mo Yan’s novels, the color words can serve as subject\subject center, predicate\predicate center, object\object center, attribute, adverbial modifier and so on. From the point used survey of the basic color words in Mo Yan’s novels, there are many different kinds of color words.They are not only rich, dense but also various. In addition, the number of “red” gives priority to red, the usage about variation of color words is special and they participate in character names frequently. From the point of cultural value of the basic color words in Mo Yan’s novels, the cultural meaning of the color words is extremely rich and contains traditional cultural meaning and the cultural meaning in definite context. From the perspective of the pragmatic functions of the basic color words in Mo Yan’s novels, the color words have depiction function, variation function and cognitive function. The unique pragmatic functions can provide a platform for conveying one’s ideas and feelings and reveal the research value of Mo Yan novels’ basic color words.