Metaphor has been used traditionally as a figure of speech used for
special effects in a speech or an essay but it is used most often in our daily
communication in every culture and people worldwide. It was Lakoff and
Johnson’s who first noticed this abundant use of metaphor. People around the
world use different metaphor, among them, color metaphor is one. There are
numerous of metaphorical expressions with color serving as the source domain in
English, Bengali and Chinese. Color is a ubiquitous perceptual stimulus that
carries meaning and can impact the way we feel, think and act [1,2]. Every
object in the world has its own color and color terms are usually used to
depict the colors of objects in the world. As a vital human experience, colors
took attention of many scholars’ attention. The scholars who carry out a
landmark research on color terms; English has eleven basic color terms: black,
white, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange and gray [3]. The
research revealed that reason for the similarities and of color metaphor in the
three languages can be attributed to the common perceptual and cultural
experience, while the dissimilarities appeared from the different living
environment, religion, culture, custom, and philosophy. This paper makes a
comparison of color metaphor about the similarities and differences in English,
Bengali and Chinese. Understanding similarities and differences of color
metaphor in English, Bengali and Chinese is of great importance in the
cross-cultural communication. It’s beneficial for us to do
English/Bengali/Chinese teaching, English/Bengali/Chinese translation, and
appreciation of English/Bengali/Chinese culture. So this comparative study more
would be a cross-cultural study of color metaphor used in this three cultural.
Aristotle, in Poetics, defined metaphor as “the application of an alien name by
transference either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from
species to species, or by analogy, that is proportion” [4]. But now Metaphor
contains a large unexplored field. The publication of Metaphors: We Live By
makes a milestone in metaphor study [5]. In this book, the idea of “conceptual
metaphor” is put forward for the first time. Lakoff and Johnson claimed that,
“Metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought
and action”. Our ordinary conceptual system means the way we both think and
act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature” [5]. They also point out that
“the essence of metaphor is to understand and experience one kind of thing in
terms of another” [6]. In this view, metaphor becomes a valuable cognitive tool
and inevitable part of everyday human communication, understanding, and
reasoning. In 1666, Newton, for the rest time in his life as well as in human’s
history, distinguished seven colors in the order: red, orange, yellow, green,
blue and purple, that pushed forward the study of color a great deal [7]. The
color terms study could be explained from the linguistic perspective by using
the linguistic relativism proposed. In 1969, the ethnologist Brent Berlin and
Paul Kay coauthored a book Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution.
They found the evidence that people rely on some focal colors for
categorization. Correspondingly, these focal colors form the basic color words
in languages. Berlin and Kay reached 98 languages, and found the basic color
words expressions nearly all orderly came from 11 basic colors that enclosed if
a language only has two color words, they must be black and white; if the
language has the third color word, it must be red; if it has the fourth one, it
must be green or yellow, and the rest may be deduced by analogy. Influenced by
Berlin and Kay’s publication, basic color terms theory has resulted in great
achievements in cross-discipline researched. Since then, many scholars have
studied color terms from different perspectives. The predictions and
explanations on cross-cultural and experience-based semantic color associations
are known as Conceptual Metaphor Theory of Color (CMToC). The theory is based
on the idea from cognitive linguistics that the study of metaphorical language
provides valuable insights into our mental models involving color. The
remarkable papers who claim that the semantics of basic color terms in all
languages are the results of a common set of neuro-physiological processes in
which differences in wave lengths of light reaching the eye are transformed
into response differences in the visual nervous systems, while the other, led
opposed Kay and McDaniel’s claimed and suggested that color concepts are
anchored in certain universal identifiable human experiences, such as day,
night, fire, the sun, vegetation, the sky, and the ground [8]. Evidently, the
two camps look at the same phenomenon from completely different angles, one
from a neuro-physiological perspective and the other from a cognitive
perspective. So the result seemed, one accused the other of man-made connection
between language and neural responses while the other discredits its opponent’s
argument as observation unsupported by empirical evidence. In another study,
color associations for ordered linguistic concepts (letters and days) were
tested. The culture and language specificity of these effects was examined in a
large group (457) of Dutch-speaking participants, 92 English-speaking
participants, and 49 Hindi-speaking participants. The color choices which are
non-random distributions were revealed; consistencies were found across the
three language groups in color preferences for both days and letters. When the
Hindi-speaking participants were presented, with letter stimuli matched on
phonology, their pattern of letter-to-color preferences still showed
similarities with Dutch- and English-speaking participants, interestingly.
Moreover, it was found that the color preferences corresponded between
participants indicating to have conscious color experiences with letters or
days (putative synesthetes) and participants who do not (non-synesthetes). The
outcome of the study supported a notion of abstract concepts (such as days and
letters) that are not represented in isolation, but are connected to perceptual
representational systems. Among those connections, some of these connections to
color representations are shared across different language and cultural groups.
In the year 1973, the connotative structure of the English color terms black,
white, grey, red, yellow, green and blue and their equivalent color terms in 20
other languages of the world using the Semantic Differential Technique was
analyzed by Adams & Osgood [9,10]. An important aspect to be taken into
account is that Adams & Osgood’s methodology requires participants to make
explicit ratings on the position of a given word (e.g. red) in a scale between
two poles (e.g. between the terms fresh and stale, or hot and cold). Factor
analysis generates the dimensions, and the specific ratings are then used to
calculate the value of each word on the dimensions. Therefore, the methodology captures
explicit judgments about the connotative loadings of terms. But for most color
emotion psychologists ‘the activation of the colour association, as well as its
influence on affect, cognition, and behavior, is viewed as occurring without
the individual’s conscious awareness or intention’. Therefore it is pertinent
to investigate whether the same values in the semantic dimensions can be found
at an unconscious level as well. The Implicit Association Test (IAT), which is
a new experimental methodology, is used to investigate the implicit connotative
structure of the Peninsular Spanish color terms rojo (red), azul (blue), verde
(green) and amarillo (yellow) in terms of Osgood’s universal semantic
dimensions: Evaluation (good–bad), Activity (excited–relaxed) and Potency
(strong–weak) (Soriano & Valenzuela, 2009, 421). The findings of the study
showed a connotative profile compatible with the previous literature, except
for the valence (good–bad) of some of the color terms, which is reversed. They
suggested reasons for both these similarities and differences with previous
studies and proposed further research to test these implicit connotations and
their effect on the association of color with emotion words. Another study
focusing on English and Spanish languages, that depth into the nature of
motivation and into the literal and metaphorical continuum of color expressions
for red and green color. They focus on the analysis of color metaphors in
relation to concepts different from those of emotions, in non-literary texts,
and where synaesthesia is not the only motivation. The corpus consists of
lexical items, idioms and collocations where colour contributes to meaning,
taken from the BNC (English) and the CREA (Spanish). The study shows that a)
the literal-metaphorical cline cannot always be observed within the same
expression; b) the importance of the centre of the cline made up of chains of
entailments is predominantly based on cultural knowledge, as well as on value
judgments assigned to colors by the language community focusing the goal of
this paper is to deepen into the nature of motivation and into the
literal/metaphorical continuum of expressions with colors red and green in
English and Spanish approaches for a study on color metaphor, what was more a comparative
study on use of color metaphor used in Chinese and English language unlike the
above mentioned studies. His study mostly present the cultural differences and
similarities of this two language practitioners unlike the above papers that
concerns more the semantically use of color metaphor. This paper mainly follows
the study style of Yu Weihua but it will also explore whether these
similarities have any influence on foreign language cognition. Color metaphor,
a universal phenomenon, is used both in English and Bengali language and
culture. The “mapping of the logic of one domain (usually, but not always a
concrete domain) onto another (usually more abstract) domain” is the way
Metaphor defined [11]. Color is an important part of the human experience and
plays a vital part in our daily life. People always use color words to express
their understandings and thought. Both English and Bengali language share some
similarities and dissimilarities using of color metaphor. This paper mainly
concerns with some basic color metaphor such as black, white, red, yellow,
orange, blue and green including their usage in English and Bengali language.