A cognitive study of colour terms in Persian and English

Abstract

This study aims at conducting a contrastive study of colour metaphors in Persian and English within the framework of cognitive linguistics. To this end, it adopts primarily the revised model of Kövecses (2005), in which he treats metaphor as a cognitivecultural phenomenon. The results of the study indicate some similarities and differences between the colour metaphors in English and Persian. Similarities are mostly attributed to either a kind of universal motivation for the metaphors to emerge in the two languages or those which penetrating into Persian through translation, whereas differences found related to the colour metaphors in the two languages indicating the culture-specific nature of the colour metaphors. © 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd.