From metonymy to metaphor: A diachronic corpus-based comparison of metaphorical meanings of English and Chinese colour terms

Zhao, Ziyi (2025) From metonymy to metaphor: A diachronic corpus-based comparison of metaphorical meanings of English and Chinese colour terms. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

Cross-cultural comparisons of metaphors mostly take the form of synchronic research (e.g. Kövecses 2005). However, diachronic research contributes not only to revealing cultural factors of one language (e.g. Gevaert 1995) but also to investigating universal trends (e.g. Trim 2014). Colour metaphors are appropriate subjects to investigate the interplay of similar conceptualisation (even potentially universal trends) and cultural specificity because of the common metonymic relationships to the universal natural world and culture-specific symbolism of colours. This thesis compares English and Chinese colour metaphors and analyses the similarities and differences in the metaphorical conceptualisation and ongoing development of metaphorical expression. It investigates five pairs of English and Chinese colour terms with the same etymological metonymies (green, orange, rose/rosy, purple, gold(en) and their Chinese counterparts qing/lv, cheng(se)/juse, meiguise, zi, jin(se)), and three pairs with different etymological metonymies (pink, peach(y), beige and their Chinese counterparts fen(hong)(se), tao(hua)se, mise), in order to investigate the interaction between metonymy and metaphor in the development of both English and Chinese colour metaphors.

This thesis uses a corpus-based method of collecting metaphorical senses of colour terms from historical corpora in four periods of English and Chinese respectively, to reveal and compare the routes taken during the course of their metaphorical development. The corpora are supplemented by other resources – dictionaries, the Historical Thesaurus of English, and Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus.

The results show that colour metaphors develop from connotations of colour in a process that moves from metonymy to metaphor. The study suggests that the metaphorical conceptualisation of colour terms starts from an experiential scene that generates connotations associated with colour. The generation process has three main motivations: metonymic basis, cultural context and relationship with other colours. Then, the connotations are generalised to a distinct domain outside of the experiential scene and finally develop into metaphorical meanings. The similarities are motivated by the potentially universal patterns both in the generation process (which give rise to the same connotations of the same metonymic bases) and in the generalisation process (which trigger the shared generic conceptualisations of metaphorical mappings). The potentially universal pattern in colour metaphors also reveals another kind of potentially universal human experience relating to the environment other than embodiment as the experiential bases of potential universal metaphors. The differences are driven by culturally motivated patterns in the generation process and generalisation process, which give rise to culturally specific connotations and metaphorical mappings.

• Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
• Qualification Level: Doctoral
• Keywords: colour metaphors, English and Chinese comparison, colour terms, metonymy, metaphor, diachronic method, corpus-based method.
• Subjects: P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics
• Colleges/Schools: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Critical Studies > English Language and Linguistics
• Supervisor's Name: Anderson, Professor Wendy and Hough, Professor Carole
• Date of Award: 2025
• Depositing User: Theses Team
• Unique ID: glathesis:2025-85524
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 22 Oct 2025 09:54
• Last Modified: 27 Oct 2025 09:28
• Thesis DOI: 10.5525/gla.thesis.85524
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/85524