A Corpus-based Contrastive Study On The Conceptual Metaphor Of The Color "White" In English And Chinese

Metaphor study is always a focus for linguistics.And in traditional studies,metaphor was regarded as a way to modify a language.People didn't change their ideas until Lakoff and Johnson's book Metaphors We Live By was published.They propose Conceptual Metaphor Theory(CMT)in this book and put forward that “metaphor is not just a matter of language,that is,of mere words.We shall argue that,on the contrary,human thought processes are largely metaphorical”(1980:6).After that,lots of books and dissertations about conceptual metaphor are published,and linguistic scholars do not only study metaphor in rhetoric,but also combine it with other fields.And this paper uses two corpora,or CCL and COCA,to get sufficient language sample of the color's usages,and then the author systematically compares the metaphorical usages of color term “white” in Chinses and English.At the first step,the author is to distinguish metaphorical usages and non-metaphorical usages of “white” and “?”,and then is to classify the metaphorical usages as different types and analyze each type's frequency,and the last is to contrast these types in Chinese and English.There are about three findings: 1)Generally,the number of metaphorical usages' types of “white” in English is less than that of “?” in Chinese.2)There are not only similarities but also dissimilarities between English and Chinese.3)The mechanism of “white” metaphor,in Chapter four,is the Lakoff's cross-domain mapping.