Towards The Semantic Evolution Of Chinese Color Term Hong:A Diachronic Behavioral Profile Analysis

As one of the basic color terms in Chinese,Hong has enriched senses and is salient in cognition.Hong was firstly used to represent a light red color of silk,and it was not formally used to refer to the color red until the Tang Dynasty.The practice of using objects to represent colors is the basic way of creating color terms in Chinese.This process of generalization from referring to the color of an object to the color shows that the semantic meaning of Hong has undergone abstraction and evolution.Metaphorical usages such as Zouhong 走红 and Yanhong 眼红 are more obvious examples of this process.Although the conceptual metaphorization of this color term has been explored before,previous studies were mostly based on synchronic linguistic data,failing to uncover the semantic evolution of this color term that has great cognitive importance.In this thesis,the semantic evolution of the Chinese polysemous color word Hong was investigated by combining the cognitive and corpus linguistic approach.This thesis drew on one of the latest statistical analysis methods in corpus linguistics,behavioral profiling(BP)approach and employed mechanism of semantic exchange from cognitive linguistic perspective to discuss and explain the semantic evolution of this color term over time.The analysis demonstrated that the semantics of Hong changed significantly in all five periods.In Archaic Chinese,Hong mainly modified plants and natural phenomena,while in the Middle Chinese,the metonymized usage of Hong occurred,with this color term mostly being metonymized as red flowers,which was related to the more prominent attribute of flowers,red in color.In the Near Ancient Chinese,with the springing of Tang and Song poetry,the metaphorical usage of Hong emerged,with Hong referred to youth.Literature works in Modern Chinese were more popular and colloquial,and hence the common usages of this color term were reflected.The metaphorical and metonymic meanings of Hong increased in this period,which mirrored the psychological state and values of language users in this late feudal period.In Contemporary Chinese,the semantic evolution of Hong was also associated with cultural exchange and communication,and the connotation of some metaphorical meanings has also changed with the progress of the times.This study has verified that the boundary among semantic members in the same category is fuzzy.Besides,this study is juxtaposed with other fruitful BP studies of the phenomenon of polysemy,providing additional evidence that the BP approach is suitable to study fine-grained semantic variation in a systematic and data-driven way.