Cultural Mechanism Of Color-based Metaphors: A Contrastive Study Between Chinese And English

According to Lakoff and Johnson,metaphor is pervasive in everyday life,and it is not only considered to be a linguistic phenomenon but a cognitive one.Colors are ubiquitous in both Chinese and English and they are rich in metaphorical uses because they carry abundant meanings in culture.Color-based metaphors,on one hand,directly reflect similarities and disparities in cultures of nations with different languages;on the other hand,color-based metaphors contribute to understanding a variety of languages set in vastly different cultural backgrounds.Although many scholars conduct research on color-based metaphors,most previous studies mainly focus on either evolution or cultural connotations of color words and their metaphorical expressions in words of philosophy,cognitive psychology,cognitive sociolinguistics,etc.;none of the previous research makes contrastive studies on color-based metaphors between Chinese and English,to find out a systematic cultural mechanism of color-based metaphors between different cultural backgrounds.Therefore,this thesis attempts to explore the contrastive study on the cultural mechanism of color-based metaphors.As a philosophical foundation of cognitive science,philosophy of mind states that the human mind-body relationship as the language representation is used to express human thoughts,feelings,perception and experience.Hence,based on Liao Qiaoyun’s Annotation-Denotation Relevance-Inheritance Model(ADRIM),this research is to adopt a contrastive study on a systematic cultural mechanism of color-based metaphors between Chinese and English,and the metaphorical expressions are mainly concerned with six basic color words: red,green,yellow,blue,black and white.The construal mechanism of color-based metaphors can be formulated as follows.Firstly,based on the stereotypical relations,the explicit expression is presented by RelevanceInheritance means in a certain context,in which the speaker’s attitude will be demonstrated indirectly.Second,with a certain attitude,the target listener will receive a visual stimulus from the color,whose possible features lie in the cultural origins.Therefore,after the abstraction of the relevant rhetorical features grounded in the cultural origin,the explicit expression is successfully established,and the communicative intention of the speaker can be achieved.Based on the ADRIM,the analysis demonstrates that the cultural mechanism of the color-based metaphors emanates from the color stimulus and human perception of color,where the dissimilarities between Chinese and English lie in different cultural origins by abstracting the possible features.Given this,the thesis can provide evidence of contrastive studies on the cultural mechanism of semantic rhetorics.