Metaphorical Extensions of the Colour Terms 'Black' and 'White' in English and Serbian
I. Živančević Sekeruš (ed) (2013). Šesti međunarodni interdisciplinarni simpozijum Susret kultura – Zbornik radova. Novi Sad: Filozofski fakultet, pp. 547-558
12 Pages Posted: 30 Nov 2013 Last revised: 2 Nov 2019
Date Written: November 28, 2013
Abstract
This paper focuses on the basic colour terms, one of the quite well covered topics not only in linguistics, but also in anthropology, physics and psychology. It is a one-way study (Serbian to English) which compares and contrasts the metaphorical extensions of the two most basic colour terms, black and white, in Serbian and English. These two terms have been identified as the most basic ones, since they were found to exist even in languages which have only two names for colours. In our analysis metaphorical extensions were isolated after comparing several Serbian and English dictionaries, and attempts were made at making hypotheses about how these extensions came into being. The study shows that there is a relatively high degree of correspondence between the two compared languages in terms of the existence of underlying conceptual metaphors with black and white serving as source domains.
Keywords: colour terms, black, white, metaphorical extensions, conceptual metaphor, English, Serbian
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