A Contrastive Study Of Metaphor In Basic Color Term RED Between English And Chinese From The Perspective Of Cognitive Linguistics

Metaphor,as a cognitive device,is widely employed in human language.The comparative study of metaphor between English and Chinese is also a main direction of metaphor studies.As one of the basic cognitive domains,color domain is recorded in human language as color terms and has rich metaphorical meanings.Therefore,by studying the metaphors of color term in English and Chinese,we can find out the cognitive process of color term metaphors in English and Chinese and the factors that affect the cognitive results,so that people can better understand and use color term metaphors.According to the characteristics and development order of colors in language,Kay and Berlin summed up the Basic Color Term theory.According to the Basic Color Term Theory,RED is the first colorful basic color term in human language.In this paper,we use the conceptual metaphor theory as the theoretical framework.In Corpora of Contemporary American English and Corpus of Center for Chinese Linguistics PKU,1000 corpora with RED were randomly selected.By using Oxford English Dictionary and Modern Chinese Dictionary to make qualitative analysis,we can summarize the metaphorical meanings of red in English and Chinese;by comparing the metaphorical meanings of red in English and Chinese,we can find out the differences and similarities and the factors that lead to the similarities and differences between English and Chinese metaphors with red as the source domain.The author found that there are a lot of metaphors of RED in both English and Chinese.The main metaphorical meanings of red in English are Warning,Intensity,Debt,Bureaucracy,etc.,while in Chinese are warning,Enjoyment,Femininity,Politics,etc.Among them,red as a metaphor of Politics,Warning,Intensity,etc.exists in both Chinese and English,which is mainly determined by the physiological mechanism of human eye and the physical attribute of red light.There are unique metaphorical meanings in both English and Chinese,such as Bureaucracy in English and Love in Chinese.The main cause of these differences is the difference between Chinese and Western cultures.Metaphors are culturally dependent,so the same source of different cultures produces different mappings.In addition,the author finds that the mapping process of red in English and Chinese metaphors is not all completed in one step.Some metaphors are based on metonymy.The purpose of this study is to provide suggestions for the study of color terms in other fields,such as psychology,which is conducive to the interdisciplinary interaction and development between cognitive linguistics and other disciplines.It is hoped that through the contrastive study of metaphor in RED between English and Chinese,the teaching of cross-cultural communication will be enlightened.