색채어은유의 인지언어학적 대조연구

A Cognitive Study on Color term Metaphors in English, Korean, Chinese: Focused on Visual Universals and Quantitative Scheme

There have been various comparative studies on color metaphors and their general conclusion is color is a difficult concept to figure out without culture-specific factors. But, considering Wierzbicka(1990, 2006, 2008)’s suggestion that ‘color’ is not a universal human concept and ‘seeing’ is rather universal phenomenon in all cultures, this paper attempts to outline some alternative aspects to understand color term metaphors based on visual scheme: brightness and saturation. In this paper, to explore visual universals in cross culture, the prototypes and the usages of WHITE, BLACK, YELLOW in English, Korean, Chinese are analyzed. First, it is claimed that the natural prototypes can be categorized into having bright property(light-emitting, reflectivity, illumination, vividness) or not. It is also revealed that good(positive) meanings are based on a manifestation of the bright characteristic of color, bad(negative) values are associated with absence of brightness in all three languages.