A Cognitive Approach to the Metonymy and Metaphor-Based Study of “Black” in English

Abstract

According to the contemporary theories, metonymy and metaphor are two major types of word meaning extension, which reveal how people perceive unfamiliar, abstract concepts via familiar, concrete one on the basis of bodily experience. Through the data of “black” from Oxford Advanced Learner’s English-Chinese Dictionary (6th Edition), under the theories in cognitive linguistics, namely, the prototype theory, conceptual metaphor theory, metonymy theory, this paper takes the basic color term “black” in English as an example to analyze the cognitive semantic structure and summarizes the cause of it. This paper aims to strengthen the accuracy of words meaning and translation as well as the cross-cultural awareness and capacity.