A Study On The Valence Of Emotion Of Color Metaphor

Cognitive linguistics suggests that like space domain, color domain is one of the most basic cognitive domains. Chinese often use red to explain the meaning of happiness and adaptability, related word proof like hongren, honghuo and et.al. The same of the time, in some situation, red has another meaning, that is warning and disaster, related word proof like red light and red alarm. The same, green has the meaning of healthy and peace, related word proof like green food. In another way, envy is not very often to seen, as another meaning of green.It is not very difficult to find that, red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue and purple, all this seven different colors have their different and special metaphor meanings, which have opposite two sides, one is positive, another is negative. These two sides metaphor meanings are pervasive existing in people’s everyday life. Most of adults are very familiar with them. The attitudes above maybe just come from researchers’empiricism. Will the data from empirical researches prove all these attitudes?This research has three experiments, which try to find that, the colors that people often see really have different metaphor meanings. And these metaphor meanings have two opposite sides, one is positive, another is negative. To fine when people begin to form these opposite metaphor meanings is our purpose, too.