对颜色词汇与中西方民族心理形成之间关系的探究

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1、对颜色词汇与中西方民族心理形成之间关系的探究A Study on Color Vocabulary and Nations Psychology between Chinese and BritishContentsAbstract .1Key words .2I. Introduction.2II. Macroscopic different meanings of national culture and psychology differences.22.1 The Definition of Basic Color Term.22.2 Scope of the Study.22.2.1

2、 The objectivist theories of meaning.32.2.2 Historical Background of Polysemy.42.3 The Conceptualization of Color Words: From Color Perception to Color Categorization.42.3.1Co-existing system of linguistic relativism and linguistic universalism.6III. The semantic anlysis of the six basic color terms

3、 in Chinese.73.1 The Properties of the Six Basic Color Categories in Chinese.83.1.1 Hei(黑 “BLACK)93.1.2 Bai(白 “WHITE).103.1.3 Hong(红“RED).103.1.4 Huang(黄 “YELLOW).133.1.5 Lu/Qing(绿/青“GREEN)143.1.6 Lan/Qing(蓝/青 “BLUE)153.2 General Discussion.153.2.1 The Contradictory Senses of One and the Same Color

4、Word.163.2.2 The Opposite Semantic Relations between Different Color Words.16IV. Conclusion17References17 A Study on Color Vocabulary and Nations Psychology between the Chinese and British摘 要：本文拟从认知语义学的观点出发，探讨东西方基本颜色词(“黑”、“白”、“红”、“黄”、“绿/青”、“蓝/青”)的语义结构特征，从而论证多义现象的形成，及其民族性格的发展变化，通过隐喻和转喻的认知方式由一个词的原型意义向

5、其他意义扩展的过程，是人类认知范畴化和概念化的结果。在分析并讨论每个基本颜色词的隐喻和转喻认知后，本文指出:同一颜色词语具有 “双重语义”特征，而不同颜色词语之间则存在语义对立关系;此外，位于Berlin & Kay (1969)所发现的基本颜色词 “蕴涵层级”左边的颜色词比右边的颜色词有较丰富的隐喻延伸用法，即 “黑”、“白”、“红，的隐喻延伸用法较 “黄”、“绿”、“蓝”丰富;最后，汉语颜色词的延伸用法展示了跨语言特征与语言独特性的并存。关键词：颜色词； 汉语词汇；民族心理；Abstract: The aim of the present BA thesis is to examine t

6、he semantics of the six basic color terms in Chinese and English, i.e., hei BLACK, bai WHITE, hongRED, huang YELLOW, lu/ging GREEN, lan/ging BLUE, so a study on color vocabulary and nations psychology between the Chinese and English, as to account for the motivated relations between the senses of a

7、single word. The theoretical framework underlying my investigation is that of cognitive linguistics (Lakoff 1987; Langacker 1987), which takes not the objective real world but human perception and understanding of the world to be the basis for the structure of human language(Sweetser 2002: 2), and w

8、hich explains polysemy in terms of conceptual organization and categorization. It is along these cognitive lines that I attempt to explore the metaphorical and metonymic extensions of the six basic color words in Chinese and English, First, the contradictory senses of one and the same color word can

9、 be found in the data I have studied. Second, the opposite semantic relations seem to exist between the different color words. Third, colors on the left of the Berlin and Kays implicational hierarchy (i.e., BLACK, WHITE and RED) prove to be more productive in creating metaphorical uses than those on

10、 the right (i.e., YELLOW, GREEN and BLUE). Finally, the patterns of meaning extension of the Chinese color words can be both cross-linguistic and language-specific. This study provides the evidence that the cognitive approach to lexis as an array of semantic networks triggered by the words within th

11、em proves a powerful explanation in solving a number of troublesome issues in lexical semantics.Key words: Color vocabulary; Chinese color words; nations psychologyI. IntroductionColor has been enthralling scientists for centuries. Many disciplines in science, among which physics, neurology, cogniti

12、ve science, philosophy, psychology, linguistics and anthropology, have all contributed to a vast body of work on the aspects of human color vision, including color perception, color categorization and color naming. Cognitive processes concerned with color have often been considered to be the ideal t

13、est ground for verifying theories proposed in the above-mentioned disciplines.II. Macroscopic different meanings of national culture and psychological differences2.1 The definition of basic color termsAll languages have words that may be used to identify particular colors, but there is always a spec

14、ial subset of these words known as basic color terms. A basic color term is defined on the basis of a number of criteria such as: (1) monolexemic, which is not composed of composite parts, for example, bluish in English; it is not hyponymically included within another color term, scarlet, which is a

15、 kind of red; it is not collocation ally restricted, English blond which is restricted to hair and wood; and, perhaps most problematically; (2) psychologically salient, for example, listed first among terms in the given domain or most widely known. Commonly, these criteria converge, but in individua

16、l cases they may conflict, requiring additional criteria or creative decisions on the part of the analyst. These criteria are specified by Berlin and Kay (1969), who, by examining descriptions of a wide range of languages, conclude that all languages have between two and eleven such words, a finding

17、 that will be discussed in detail later.2.2 Scope of the StudyAccording to Berlin and Kay (1969)s criteria, there is no doubt that English has all eleven basic color terms: black, white, red, yellow, green, blue, brown, grey, orange, purple, pink. In contrast, the number of the Chinese basic color t

18、erms is still a controversial issue, but the details of the dispute need concern us here. Suffice it to say that the primary colors(Kay & McDaniel 1978), i.e., the first six of all eleven basic colors, are hardly excluded from any researchers work. I am in favor of the proposal made by the scholar小平

19、(1988), who argues for the existence of ten basic color terms in Chinese on the basis of a systematic study. Except for the fenhong PINK, all the other ten color terms are covered by his work.The present study has only concerned itself with the six basic color terms in Chinese, i.e., hei BLACK, bai

20、WHITE, hong RED, huang YELLOW, GREEN, lan/ging BLUE, with a cognitive view so as to account for how color terms are used to indicate abstract concepts. However, this does not imply that other color terms are unworthy of exploration. Similarly, it is by no means claimed that a thorough study has been

21、 done regarding the six basic color terms in question. The reason for this is that the data collected is far from comprehensive in terms of quantity, and could sometimes be biased in terms of quality, though an attempt is made to cover expressions used by a wide range of people.2.2.1 The objectivist

22、 theories of meaningThe myth of objectivism, which argues that we have access to absolute and unconditioned truth about the world, has dominated Western culture, and in particular Western philosophy, from the Presocratics to the present day (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 195). This objectivist tradition

23、has very specific consequences for the theories of meaning that understand objective reality as independent of human cognition, such as Frege (Geach and Black1952), Montagues Model-theoretical Semantics (Dowry et al. 1981; Cann1993) and Barwise and Perrys (1983) Situation Semantics. In these theorie

24、s, meaning is thought of as basically a relationship between word and world i.e., between a linguistic form and an object or state of affairs referred to or described by that form (Sweetser 2002: 1), without the intervention of human understanding. This claim is rather problematic, for it eliminates

25、 cognitive organization from the linguistic system. For example, if we use a word meaning black to express evil, it seems unlikely that there is any objective correlation in the real world between black things and evil things, or any larger objectively chosen category which includes just these and n

26、o others. The real world, if we mean one that is outside of human cognitive organization, is not so constructed as to group the black with the evil. Rather it is our cognitive structuring of the world that can create such identification. And if language uses a word for our cognitive category, then l

27、anguage cannot be described in terms of pure between word and world: unless, by world, we mean our experiential picture of the world (Sweetser 2002: 5).2.2.2 Historical Background of PolysemyPolysemy, the association of two or more related senses with a single linguistic form (Taylor 2001: 99), is o

28、ne of the most important issues of recent linguistic semantics, since the analysis of polysemy is indispensable for accurate reading, language acquisition, computational linguistics and similar tasks. Although its significance is already recognized in the historical-philological tradition in the beg

29、inning of the 20th century and was emphasized again by Ullmann (1967), it is not until recently that polysemy has become a central issue again in linguistic semantics.These views, which maximize homonymy at the expense of polysemy, arouse critical problems. To consider two meanings sharing a single

30、form as two separate words leads to proliferation of words. This is a crucial situation for lexicographers. Also restricting polysemy is contradictory to the theory of word economy. With the emergence of cognitive linguistics in the 1970s, the concern for the relationship between language and cognit

31、ion has grown. The notion that lexical items are conceptual categories and that they have to be studied and investigated as reflecting general cognitive principles rather than purely formal linguistic principles, has penetrated through to linguists. Their interest in polysemy has increased and the p

32、olysemous nature of most units of language has become an essential issue in linguistics.2.3 The Conceptualization of Color Words: From Color Perception to Color CeatgorizationThe physiology of human vision is constant across all races and populations of present-day members of the genus Homo, provide

33、d there is no individual pathology. All of the colors that we see are a combination of six primary colors: red, yellow, green, blue, white and black. For example, orange is a combination of red and yellow; purple, of red and blue. Physically color is determined by the wavelength of light, with light

34、 of long wavelength appearing red, with orange, yellow, green, blue and purple having increasingly shorter wavelengths. But perceptually color is a three-dimensional continuum, defined by hue, brightness and saturation. Hue is the coloredness of a color, its redness or yellowness, greenness or bluen

35、ess. Not all colors have hues; white, black and grey do not. Colors with hue are known as chromatic colors; those without hue, achromatic colors. Saturation defines the strength of hue within a given color. Saturated colors have vivid hues, while desaturated colors are closer to grey. Finally, brigh

36、tness indicates the light reflectance of a color, from dazzling to barely visible (Foley 2001: 151). Why is color perceived along these dimensions? It is simply because the human visual system is structured in such a way as to reveal these dimensions, according to the investigation of the neurophysi

37、ology of color vision by De Valois and his associates (De Valois et al. 1966). Human color perception can be studied at several levels. At the neurological level, electro-magnetic energy is transformed in the photoreceptors of the retina into a neural signal, which is then converged to the brain. Hu

38、mans have three different types of color sensitive photoreceptors: one sensitive for reddish light, one for greenish and one for bluish light. The cells are cone-shaped and respectively called the L, M and S-cones, designating their sensitivity to long, middle and short wavelengths. Humans are thus

39、trichromatic species. However, at the psychological level, color seems to occur in pairs in accordance with Herings opponent color theory. In this theory, the human visual system consists of three subsystems. The first subsystem signals differences in brightness. The other two signals differences in

40、 hue: one for red-green oppositions and one for yellow-blue oppositions: This gives rise to the two-stage color theory. In the first stage, light is received by three types of photoreceptors, and in the second the outputs are interconnected to form red-green,. yellow-blue and white-black oppositions

41、. The system of oppositions also explains the difference between pure hue and secondary mix colors (c.f. Kay and McDaniel 1978). However, we are still left with a continuous color experience, handling color information would require cutting up that color continuum. This brings us to color categoriza

42、tion.However, Berlin and Kay (1969) challenged the relativist assumption and created a controversy that continues to this day. At the heart of the controversy is the following claim: some color categories are basic in the sense of being cultural universals. Using the original stimulus materials of L

43、enneberg and Roberts (1956) in a Whorfian-influenced study, Berlin and Kay compared the denotation of basic color terms in twenty languages and examined another seventy-eight languages from the literature. They reported that there are universals in the semantics of color: the major color terms of al

44、l languages are focused on one of eleven basic colors. Further, they postulated an evolutionary sequence for the development of color lexicons according to which black and white precede red, red precedes green and yellow, green and yellow precede blue, blue precedes brown and brown precedes purple,

45、pink, orange and grey.What made it possible for them to find these regularities was their discovery of focal colors. Regardless of the number of color terms in a language, focal colors are remarkably consistent across languages. It was Berlin and Kays basic insight concerning focal colors that stimu

46、lated the pioneering research of Eleanor Rosch (1973,1977,1978) on the nature of human categorization. While psychologists largely welcomed Berlin and Kays findings, anthropologists expressed skepticism mostly on methodological grounds in the following years, a great deal of research on color termin

47、ologies confirmed the broad outlines of the Berlin and Kays findings, while leading to reformulation of the encoding sequence (Kay 1975). Subsequently, Kay and McDaniel (1978) again reconceptualized the encoding sequence, introducing the notion of fuzzy set into a formal model of color lexicons. Kay

48、 and McDaniel model emphasized: (1) the six primary colors of the opponent theory (black, white, red, yellow, green and blue); (2) certain fuzzy unions of these categories (notably, green or blue, red or yellow, black or green or blue, white or red or yellow); (3) the binary colors based on fuzzy in

49、tersections of primaries (e.g. orange, purple). Kay and McDaniel also related the universals of color semantics to the psychophysical and neurophysiological results of De Valois and his associates (e.g. De Valois et al. 1966).Since 1978, there have been two major surveys of color lexicons, both supp

50、orting the two broad Berlin and Kay hypotheses of semantic universals and evolutionary sequence of basic color term systems. These are the World Color Survey (Kay, Berlin, Maffi and Merrifield 1997) and the Middle American Color Survey (Maclaury 1997). Relativist objection to Berlin and Kay paradigm

51、 of research on color categorization has continued, pleading for a subtler attitude and for more carefully collected and interpreted data (e.g. Lucy 1997).System of Linguistic Relativism and Linguistic2.3.1 Co-existing system of linguistic relativism and linguistic universalismSystem of Linguistic R

52、elativism and Linguistic universalism along with Cognitive Standpoint so far we have outlined two radically divergent assumptions about color terminologies, which are symptomatic of two equally divergent views of the relationships between language and thought. Since each has its own merits, Berlin a

53、nd Kay (1969) continue to compete for a more scientific explanation of the issue. The wide acceptance of Universalism in the past thirty years does not mean the last word for the controversy observed. The recent findings in this field represent a significant retreat from the early strong universals

54、proposed in Berlin and Kay (1969). The whole work in universals of color categorization is to demonstrate that the universal design features of the human perceptual system and cognitive mechanism constrain the formation and references of linguistic categories. They claim that the color concepts are

55、not objectively out there in the world, independent of any beings, but embodied in that focal colors are partly determined by human biology. This point fits in perfectly with cognitive principles sketched above. However, the universalistic arguments of Berlin and Kay do not necessarily refute all re

56、lativist considerations under all conditions. Language can certainly vary semantically, but obviously not without constraints. These constraints are often a complex interface of both human and cognitive universals, and the particulars of cultures and languages (Casson 1997: 75). It has been commente

57、d by some relativists that Berlin and Kay, and subsequent workers, only get their results by bracketing out rich cultural information about the meanings of the basic color terms and by focusing on the chromatic information they denote. Anyway, culture is a crucial mediating force in color naming and

58、 the system of basic color terms. This point is echoed linguistically by Wierzbicka (1990) who notes that the meaning of a color term in a language cannot possibly be a neural response to a color chip, but rather the cognitive understanding of that term: Language reflects what happens in the mind, n

59、ot what happens in the brain summarises (Wierzbicka 1990: 163). Foley (2001: 162) this view nicely: Basic color terms stand in meaningful relationships to each other not only according to chromatic contrasts, but many other culturally defined dimensions, and, further, they individually and .as a gro

60、up may enter into relations with many other terms and semantic domains as part and parcel of the wider meaningful practices which make up the culture. Therefore, wed better advocate the co-existing system of Linguistic Relativism and Linguistic Universalism along with the Cognitive meaning in terms

61、of our bodily, standpoint in search for an explanation of physical, social and cultural experiences.III. The semantic anlysis of the six basic color terms in Chinese As discussed in the preceding chapter, much of the meaning is grounded in human cognitive experiences: experiences of the culture, soc

62、ial, mental. And in particular, the senses of a polysemous lexical item can be seen as forming a radial category, with each sense being a member of that category. The senses may not be similar in the sense of sharing properties, but instead are related to one another in other motivated fashions. Met

63、aphor and metonymy are major structuring forces in forming complex networks of interrelated meanings that are all expressed by one word. In pursuit of a better understanding of those networks, we need further investigation of the connections between the different meanings of polysemous lexical categ

64、ories. This chapter is an attempt to map out the systematic connections between extended senses of the six basic color terms in Chinese. I will be examining are examples of the sort of metaphorically or metonymically structured, non-objective connections between senses. My purpose is to increase our general understanding of semantic relatedness. Whats more, it is of particular significance to note that the interaction between synch