Basic Colors and Their Metaphorical Expressions in English and Persian: Lakoff's Conceptual Metaphor Theory in Focus

Basic Colors and Their Metaphorical Expressions in English and Persian: Lakoff's Conceptual Metaphor Theory in Focus

Rasekh, Abbass Eslami
Ghafel, Banafsheh

Metaphorical language is an indispensable part of human life, involving language, thought and action (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Lakoff, 1998). Accordingly, metaphor plays a major role in people's everyday language use and thinking. Our conceptual system is based on experiences we have gained with interacting with people and things surrounding us. In this respect, color plays an important role in convention metaphorical expressions in people's lives and daily communication. As a sub-category of metaphors, color terms are widely used literally and metaphorically in different languages and may also reflect cultural identities of language users. Replying on ―Contrastive Analysis of Metaphors‖ proposed by Barcelona (2001, cf. Soriano, 2003) as a cognitive qualitative method and on the basis of ―Conceptual Metaphor Theory‖ (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999, 2003; Grady 1997; Kôvecses 2000, 2002, 2005; etc), this paper tries to investigate the extent to which connotations of basic colors, as used in the structure of metaphors are varied in English and Persian on the one hand; and, as compared to their differences in their metaphorical mappings in the languages concerned, on the other hand. To do so, we collected English instances from The Oxford Dictionary of Idioms (Siefring, 2005) and The Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs (Speake, 2008) and some other dictionaries. Next, Persian instances were extracted from some Persian dictionaries. The findings of this comparative analysis show that, although the connotation of colors in the structure of metaphorical expressions are overlapping each other to some extent, most of the expressions are culture-bound and specific to each language.

Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed

2011-05

33