A Comparative Study Of Color Terms "White" And"Black" Metaphor Between English And Chinese From The Perspective Of Palmet’s Theory Of Cultural Imagery

Metaphor is widespread in our daily life, not only in language but also in thoughts and behaviors. As a linguistic phenomenon, metaphor is the carrier that can store, inherit and develop culture.Color perceptions are unique cognitive activities of mankind, including objective description of physical properties of colors. Notably, when human’ subjective recognition and emotion are mapped onto the objective world, color metaphors emerge.Palmer’s cultural linguistics integrates some theories of anthropological linguistics and cognitive linguistics, borrowing one of the fundamental concepts of cognitive linguistics, i.e. images, as its central concept. Palmer believes that human, based on objective physical images, tend to create new images through their ways of thinking and association.Aiming at fulfilling and perfecting the complete and systematic study of color terms from the perspective of cultural metaphor, the thesis, based on Metalude corpus, makes a comparative study of the "black" and "white" metaphors between English and Chinese within the framework of Palmer’s theory of cultural imagery. The cultural metaphorical mechanism is to be analyzed and similarities and differences between English and Chinese in "black" and "white" metaphors to be explored. The findings of the study are as follows. First, Palmer’s theory of cultural imagery is not only applied to the research on the analysis of cultural imagery of poetry, or to the translation of imagery in literature works, but also can be used to analyze color metaphors. Second, the comparative study of "black" metaphor between English and Chinese share some of the same target domains, such as evilness and emotion while similar target domains of "white" are goodness and emotion. On the other hand, there exist dissimilar metaphors between "black" and "黑" as well as "white" and "白" respectively. Last, the reasons for those similarities lie in the perceptual base and cultural overlapping and the causes of those dissimilarities are categorized into different natural environment, thought patterns and religious beliefs.The research enjoys great significance, theoretically and practically. In theory, it provides a new theoretical perspective for color metaphor study. In practice, from the new angle, English learners can get better understanding of color metaphors, which may enhance their abilities in the fields of cross cultural communication, second language acquisition and translation.