introduction.doc

IntroductionIn our everyday life we are inevitably confronted with various kinds of colors and thus need various kinds of words to describe them. Color terms appear more frequently in literary works. It is beyond question that almost all literary giants, from Shakespeare to Cao Xueqin, could never avoid using color words to achieve vividness and, more importantly, to achieve implications. Color words are common yet special words in both English and Chinese, for, except that they can be used to refer to specific colors, they have such semantic features as to indicate the speakers mind, his emotion as well as his attitude towards the thing or the person he is talking about. Hence color terms can cause implications and have connotative meanings attached to them. Color words have attracted attentions of many scholars to study. American scholars Brent Berlin and Paul Kay fully discussed color terms in their book Basic Color Terms: Their University and Evolution. The author compared a variety of language that different in color terms and accurately expressed the evolution of color terms. The study stands as a landmark in research of the basic colors in language. Bao Huinan(包惠南，2003) discussed the translation of color words in his book Cultural Contexts and Language Translation. He compared the English and Chinese basic color words semantically and pragmatically from the cultural perspective, pointing out the significance of the understanding of cultural background of color words. However, he just pointed out the cultural difference between the two languages, and did not comment on the Chinese and western cultures in terms of symbolic colors in detail. Moreover, there are few empirical studies focusing on the Chinese and western cultures in terms of symbolic colors. In short, it is necessary for us to conduct a survey to discover the Chinese and western cultures in terms of symbolic colors. And it is expected that some pedagogical implications for color terms learning and understanding can be found to benefit students in their communication. This thesis is intended to make some beneficial studies on this area with an aim of promoting communication of different cultures. The significance of this thesis is twofold. Theoretically, we can see how color terms serve as a solid foundation for color terms study and help bridge different cultures. Practically, it may be an extreme stand that the misuse of language is a major cause of human conflicts, but it is the case, to a certain extent, that some clashes in communication result from semantic and pragmatic failure, so people are often suggested to choose right words to mean what they say. The choice connotative meanings of the words they are using. This thesis consists of five sections. Section one is an introduction to the whole thesis. Section two is a literature review of the study on colors in foreign countries and the study on color terms in China. Section three introduces some related concept including the principles of studying color terms. Section four reports the contrast of cultural connotations of basic color t