“Red”多义现象的认知折射

Polysemy of Red Reflects Cognition

具有丰富文化内涵的颜色词不仅反映着颜色的物理属性,也折射着社会属性和时代特征。因此颜色词具有多义现象,这表现在颜色词不仅仅用来描写事物的颜色,还可以描写人的品格、心绪、健康状况,甚至在政治、经济等领域被使用。颜色词的多义现象给外语学习带来了一定的难度。认知语言学的原型范畴理论及隐喻、转喻模式较好地解释了语言中的多义现象。基于此,从认知角度出发,对英语颜色词"red"多义现象进行分析,找出英语颜色词各多义项之间的联系,可以帮助人们正确地使用英语颜色词。

Color words which have a lot of cultural connotations reflect not only the physical nature of color but also the social and times characters. So color words have polysemy, which indicates color words describe not only the color of matters but also people＇s character, sentiments, health, and they are even used in political and economic fields. The polysemy of color words creates difficulties in foreign language studying. Some theories of cognitive linguistics give a better explanation to polysemy. The theories are prototype category, metaphoric and metonymy models. The paper tries to find the relations among each meaning of a color word by analyzing the polysemy of the word ＂red＂ from the angle of cognitive linguistics so that it can help people use and understand English color words correctly.