Colors and Association色彩与联想文档格式.docx

1、Colors and Association 色彩与联想#Colors and Association# # Essentially, Language is the product of the material movement and development, through which people try to perceive and understand the objective material world. A man will live in three different kinds of worlds when he was born, namely, the phy

2、sical world, the perceptual world and the linguistic world. Theoretically, the perceptual world is based on the physical world, and the linguistic world is the complex reflection of the physical world and the perceptual world. Perception is the process of gathering information from the outside physi

3、cal world and assigning meaning to it. Our eyes, ears, nose, skin and taste buds gather information;# our brain selects from among the items of information gathered, organizes the information, and finally interprets and evaluates it.# Since we base our behavioral responses on what we perceive in the

4、 real world, the connotative meaning of color terms we get from perception depends not only on what is perceived in the physical world but also on how it is interpreted. So the denotative meaning of color terms results from humans biological response at first, nobody will mistake a red sun for a gre

5、en sun except the color-blinded people because people receive the same sensory stimuli from the same planet in the same sky, they can not distort the reality. While perception takes place inside each individual, it is culture that primarily determines the connotative meaning we assign to the colors

6、that we feel outside ourselves. In a word, culture influences our evaluation and interpretation of the connotation in the color terms. # For example, either in the west or in the east, people consider red the warm color, and they tend to associate red with blood and fire, this is undoubtedly a commo

7、n biological response of all human races based on the objective observation. Besides, different peoples will have different associative meaning for the red under the influence of various cultural elements. If two people share the same cultural frame of reference, they will turn out similar associati

8、on when exposed to the same colour, otherwise their association will differ from each other because of the diversity of their cultures. Obviously, culture exercises an irresistible influence on the peoples interpretation of the colour terms in connotation. # For example, the title of the Chinese cla

9、ssical novel Hong Lou Meng（红楼梦） reveals abundance of Chinese cultural knowledge. First,红（red） is closely related to women and love, such as the following Chinese expressions:# 红玉、红肌、红泪、红颜知已、红粉佳人 and so on. According to the famous Chinese dictionary辞海，红楼 refers to the magnificent houses of rich peopl

10、e, especially the beautiful bowers where young maids live. Therefore, 红楼does not necessarily mean red mansions in the original title. In fact, all the houses and buildings in the novel were not painted red, such as the 潇湘馆and the蘅芜院. It is clear that A Dream of the Red Mansions（红楼梦） is a mechanical

11、translation for the original title红楼梦. Secondly, the idiom Red Mansions红楼 is likely to cause western people to think of the similar expression red-bricked mansions which are considered second-class buildings. In western countries, rich people live in brown-stoned houses rather than red-bricked mansi

12、ons.# Therefore, we are comparing the Chinese culture with the English culture when we make a contrastive analysis of Chinese and English colour terms in connotation. Because of the interdependence between language and culture, a qualified intercultural communicant should be good at two languages an

13、d the two cultures concerned, only in this way can he develop a sociolinguistic awareness of the connotative meanings of the colour terms. # In this sense, whether or not a second language speaker can obtain the connotative meaning of the colour terms in the second language depends on how much lingu

14、istic knowledge and cultural knowledge he has grasped of the language he is learning. # Therefore, the contrastive analysis of the connotative meanings of English and Chinese colour terms can be performed at four levels, that is, the associative correspondence联想对应, #the associative overlap联想重合,# the

15、 associative conflict联想碰撞 and# the associative gap联想空缺. #Firstly, the associative correspondence 联想对应suggests that two different words are different in denotation, they are same in connotation. Secondly, the associative overlap联想重合 means that two different words are identical with each other both in

16、 denotation and connotation, this is surely a semantic coincidence. Thirdly, the associative conflict联想碰撞 refers to the connotative conflict between two words though similar in surface meaning to each other. Fourthly, the associative gap联想空缺 describes that one word is rich in the associative meanings in one language and there is shortage of the corresponding association in another language while two words resemble each other in the surface meaning. Of course, these four clas