On The Cultural Discrepancies Of Color Terms Between English And Chinese And Their Corresponding Cultural Contacts

Intercommunication between different nations and cultures inevitably brings forth language contact. Language and culture are closely connected with each other. According to Bloomfield (1933), cultural contact refers to a kind of language contact which spoken in different speech areas, with the linguistic contact being associated with diffusion of items of culture or technology from one linguistic group to another. That is to say, as far as cultural borrowing is concerned, all languages are equal and have the same chance to be lent to, or borrow from each other. In this thesis, the author believes that language contact is also cultural contact.Color terms are part of human language which is full of rich cultural connotations. Due to different geographic conditions, historical processes and social cultures, English and Chinese color words reflect the differences in their cultural aspects such as social values, customs, color preference etc. Therefore, based on the theory of contact-induced language change, this thesis attempts to present a comparative study of the cultural connotations of some basic color words between English and Chinese for the purposes of finding similarities and dissimilarities between them to make an analysis of the interaction between English and Chinese from the perspective of cultural contact.This thesis consists of four chapters.Chapter One generalizes the previous studies in the field of color perceptions and color words both at home and abroad.Chapter Two introduces the theoretical framework for the perspective of cultural contact. It employs three concepts: language contact, cultural contact and cultural borrowing. These three concepts testify the progress of cultural interaction in different languages. And based on the viewpoint of language changes as a result of cultural contact proposed by Thomason & Kaufman (1988), the author of this thesis presents a comparative study of color words both in English and Chinese.According to Kay and McDaniel (1978), the"primary colors"—black, white, red, yellow, green and blue, are hardly excluded from any researcher's work, because the six basic color terms mostly represent the perception of people in the colors in the world and they are endowed more meanings than other colors. Based on their views, in chapter Three, this thesis focuses on the comparative analysis of connotations of color words in both English and Chinese, and further confirms that connotations of color terms embody respective culture.Meanwhile, in the long process of communication between English and Chinese, a lot of Chinese color words and its culture have been introduced into the western world, and at the same time, many foreign color terms have produced influence on China. Therefore, in chapter Four, the interaction of two cultures are presented on the color terms.Finally, the thesis comes to the conclusion that whatever degree of contact there is between people of two languages, cultural contact leads to some kind of cultural inter-influencing. Language change is an important result of cultural contact and cultural contact is a major part of language contact. Therefore, the comparative study of color words both in English and Chinese from the perspective of cultural contact will be of great benefit for the deeper cultural communications between English and Chinese.