Study On Contemporary Chinese Color Terms Of Cosmetics

Colour words constitute a relatively independent and dynamically evolving lexical system in human language.With the development of the commodity economy and the upgrading of Internet technology,the language of advertising is in a process of constant renewal,in other words,it needs to adapt to the new age of expression while promoting the product.In terms of vocabulary,a number of new colour words have emerged in the language of cosmetic advertising.To date,there has been a great deal of research on advertising language and colour words,and colour words in advertising language have been covered,but there has been little research on the next level of colour words in cosmetic advertising language.This study selects the top11 Chinese cosmetic brands in terms of sales on e-commerce platforms and collects 1,388 colour words as a corpus to summarize the way language refers to colour semantic features of contemporary Chinese cosmetic colour words.What is more,this study compares them with ancient Chinese cosmetic colour words and contemporary English cosmetic colour words.In the first section of the thesis,this study analyses the syllabic structure and grammatical features of contemporary Chinese cosmetic colour words,and explores the semantic features in depth.In terms of overall semantics,there are three ways of representing colour in contemporary Chinese cosmetic colour words: containing traditional colour words,using specific objects to represent colour,and using abstract descriptions to trigger the imagination of colors.The traditional colour words and specific objects are the central colour components.This thesis summarises the types of central and non-central colour components,and analyses the semantic relations when combining them,as well as the types of abstract descriptions.Finally,the semantic generation mechanism is analysed from three perspectives:metaphorical cognition,metonymic cognition and association theory.In the second section of the thesis,it is found that the number and length of contemporary cosmetic colour words have increased significantly compared to ancient Chinese cosmetic colour words,and that the colour representation and cognitive mechanisms of previous colour words have continued.However,the semantic transparency of contemporary Chinese cosmetic colour words is lower,with more emphasis on additional rather than conceptual meanings.The thesis then explores the reasons for the development of Chinese cosmetic colour words,both in terms of the internal development of the language and the external context of application.In the third section of the thesis,a comparative study was carried out: between contemporary English and Chinese cosmetic colour words.The findings suggest that the two languages refer to color in the same basic way,which is determined by the common physiological basis and cognitive mechanisms of humans.However,Chinese cosmetic color words tend to use traditional color words with specific things to refer to colors,while English cosmetic color words tend to use abstract descriptions to refer to colors.The differences in the ways of referring reflect different cultural context and social psychology.This thesis also compares the differences in aesthetics and value pursuit between Chinese and Western appearance,taking the image of "human being" implied in color words as an example.Language changes from moment to moment.This paper holds that new color words are the inevitable and necessary result in the development of modern Chinese vocabulary.We should treat them with tolerance and absorb their scientific and reasonable points so as to enrich the language itself and promote the development of the language.