A Contrastive Analysis Of Metaphorical Usage Of Basic Color Idioms Between English And Chinese

Color terms are ubiquitous in language use.Metaphorical usage of color terms not only represents certain cultural features and social attributes,it is also a kind of manifestation in people's thinking and cognition.As for idioms,they are very common in languages,and are loaded with certain cultural antecedents and transmission.This thesis selects data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA),the Corpus of Center for Chinese linguistics(PKU),A New English-Chinese Dictionary,Oxford Idioms Dictionary,A Dictionary of English Idioms as well as Zhonghua Online Dictionary-Idioms and Proverbs Dictionary,etc.This thesis takes the conceptual metaphor theory as the theoretical framework,takes the comparative approach and quantitative approach as the studying methods,and then makes a general study of the mapping from the sou ce domain onto the target domain of idioms of six basic colors in English and Chinese,namely“white”,“black”,“red”,“yellow”,“green”and“blue”.Meanwhile,the thesis makes a comparative analysis of the similarities and dissimilarities of the target domains of the color idioms in English and Chinese,it also explores the reasons causing these similarities and differences.It aims to enrich the projection from color idioms onto variable target domains.It is a new application and practice to employ the conceptual metaphor theory to the color idioms,and in turn it can deepen the study of color idioms.It is also a promotion for the exploration of the similarities and dissimilarities in the respect of English and Chinese cultures,foreign language teaching as well as the translation of English and Chinese color idioms.