A Study Of The Color Words In The First Eighty Chapters Of A Dream Of Red Mansions

Color words are an interesting category in the Chinese lexical system,rich in number and systematic,rich in semantic meaning and rich in variation.The use of color in writing scenes and describing objects can be seen in traditional poetry,and A Dream of Red Mansions,as a feudal encyclopedia of the Ming and Qing dynasties,is also outstanding in its use of color.After a meticulous and comprehensive analysis of the use of color words in the first eighty episodes of A Dream of Red Mansions,a total of 125 color words were summarized,involving eight color categories: red,yellow,white,black,green,blue,purple,and gray.In this paper,we take the first eighty episodes of Dream of the Red Mansion as the corpus,and analyze and study the color words appearing in it by combining cognitive linguistics and color theory.The first chapter summarizes the color words in the first eighty recollections into eight color categories based on the prototype and category theory,and analyzes the color types,number of cases,word forms and coloring profiles of each category,in order to show the basic appearance of color word usage clearly and intuitively.The second chapter is a description of the way color words are constructed.Based on Li Hongyin’s classification of three expressions at the lexical level,color words are categorized into color identification words,color reference words,and color description words,and then eight word constructions are summarized according to the naming forms of individual color words.The third chapter is an analysis of the semantics of color words.Based on the types of semantic fields delineated by Weijie Zhou and Yande Jia,the intricate internal semantic relations of color words are grouped into subordinate meaning fields,synonymy fields,antonymy fields and depiction meaning fields,and the meanings of color words involved in them are depicted in detail.The fourth chapter is to analyze the function of the language behind the word color,Cao Xueqin’s color use is profound,color harmonization and color conflict phenomenon are present,which is not the author in the arbitrary coloring,but trying to achieve through the harmony between the color or intense conflict to regulate the contradiction,mutual contrast,complementary expression effect,which contains the author’s aesthetic concepts.Cao Xueqin wrote the color,not only to describe the search,but also to decorate the state of mind of the characters of the moment,the atmosphere of the time,writing the status of the characters in the Prospect Garden,the image of character and psychological mood,we can also glimpse from the color of the powerful influence of the environment of the times,to experience the bleakness and sadness behind the the luxury living.