earticle

영어

The purpose of this paper is to compare the usages of basic color terms expressing emotions(anger, joy, sadness, fear) in English and Chinese. There have been several researches studying color metaphor for emotions like EMOTION IS COLOR，ANGER IS RED. Those studies have paid attention to limited color words such as red and white, also they concentrated on universality of languages. The data was collected from several dictionaries and corpora in English and Chinese. In this paper, it is observed that red and white are used for anger and fear in both English and Chinese. Because those two colors are metonymic expressions related with the physical reactions like blood and nervous system. It is also found that the other colors such as yellow, blue, black have the differences between in English and Chinese. It is claimed that to appreciate various usages of those colors, cultural factors should be considered. Under a cognitive perspective the possible factors which could affect the meaning extension of the color words are suggested: 4 humors theory of the body, the way Chinese characters were made, the influence of the Romantisism.