A Study On Synaesthetic Metaphor Of Color Terms In English And Chinese

This thesis attempts to study synaesthetic metaphor of color terms in both Englishand Chinese. From the perspective of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, the collectedcorpus is analyzed in order to find the cognitive mechanism behind the synaestheticexpressions.Color not only enriches the world but also beautifies language. There has been aplenty of researches which explore the connotative meanings of color terms. But mostof them are the researches at cultural or social level. Color inherently is one of thephysical attribute which can stimulate human’s senses. It is perceived by eyes, but italso has influence on other senses besides vision. When one perception triggers morethan one sense, this generates a synaesthesia phenomenon and it appears in languageas well. Some color terms are formed in this abstract way with association of othersenses. This field is seldom studied and worth to be focused on. Synaesthesia, atraditional rhetorical device, has been studied in different fields, including psychology,neurology and linguistics. As the cognitive linguistics become prevailing, ConceptualMetaphor Theory provides a new angle to study language and gives a newunderstanding on synaesthesia. Synaesthesia phenomenon is regarded as the operationof metaphor in which both the source domain and target domain are human senses. Allthe mappings of synaesthetic metaphor are from one sense to another.Thus in this thesis, abundant color terms are collected from the relateddictionaries, books and websites. Then the classification of color terms is made toclarify the research object of this research, that is, the color terms and their expandingcollocations which reveals synaesthesia phenomenon. And the corpus is analyzed inthe framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory from the senses of touch, dimension,hearing, smell and taste. The analysis aims to specifically present and explain thecognitive interpretation behind the examples. This research generally gets three findings: Synaesthetic metaphor is an important way to form and understand abstractcolor terms; Dimension (or space-time) concept is an entrenched concept anduniversal cognitive domain which generates synaesthetic metaphor in color terms.Most of the collected examples in this thesis share the same synaesthetic transfers, thatis, the same source domain is mapped to the same target domain. For example, bothEnglish and Chinese use the concept “deep”(in Chinese “深”) to collocate with color.Because of the limitation of the author’s academic capability and the complexityof the research, there must be some defaults in the analysis and discussion. However,the author hopes that this thesis would give a better application and research onsynaesthetic metaphor and provide a new attempt to understand color terms.