From funeral to wedding ceremony: Change in the metaphoric nature of the Chinese color term white
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Ying Wang
Ying Wang (b. 1973) is a lecturer at Dalian Maritime University 〈carmiewang@hotmail.com〉. Her research interests include literacy, conversation analysis, discourse analysis, and critical discourse analysis.
Abstract
This paper discusses how white, as a sign, was metaphorized in traditional Chinese and the change of its metaphoric nature in modern Chinese. Kress's theory of the motivated relation of signifier and signified and object construction theory in CDA are employed to discuss how the different metaphoric natures of white are constructed, reflecting different interests underlying different cognitive process of conceptualization of metaphors. Out of the “interest” in promoting obedience, and in setting up a unique Chinese cultural model, white in traditional Chinese language has a metaphoric nature of inferiority, mourning, and death. However, in modern Chinese it has a metaphoric nature of pure, which is consistent with the Western views of white. The change in its metaphoric nature reflects the ideological struggle between the powerful Western cultural model and traditional Chinese cultural model.
About the author
Ying Wang (b. 1973) is a lecturer at Dalian Maritime University 〈carmiewang@hotmail.com〉. Her research interests include literacy, conversation analysis, discourse analysis, and critical discourse analysis.
©[2013] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Masthead
- Linguistics through its proper mirror-glass: Saussure, signs, segments
- The interrelation of metaphors and metonymies in sign systems of visual art: An example analysis of works by V. I. Surikov
- Information-theoretic confirmation of semiotic structures
- An information-based semiotic analysis of theories concerning theories
- An integrational response to Searlean realism, or how language does not relate to consciousness
- Peirce, meaning, and the Semantic Web
- The puzzling world of Harry Potter
- The sign system of human pretending
- Place and subjectivity in contemporary world: An analysis of Lost in Translation based on the semiotics of passion
- Peirce and the specification of borderline vagueness
- Marks as masks: A study of traditional African occupations and their visual indices
- The linguistic sign at the lexicon-syntax interface: Assumptions and implications of the Generative Lexicon Theory
- Presence of la femme: The semiotic silence
- On trans-semiosis
- Individual variation in participants' account of their own interaction
- From funeral to wedding ceremony: Change in the metaphoric nature of the Chinese color term white
