Author(s)

Hui Fan¹, Yonghong Liao², Yougen Lou^1*

¹School of Foreign Studies, Yangtze University, Jingzhou, China.
²The First Middle School of Gong’an, Jingzhou, China.

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 (6^th 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.

Black, Cognitive Approach, Metonymy, Metaphor, English

Fan, H. , Liao, Y. and Lou, Y. (2017) A Cognitive Approach to the Metonymy and Metaphor-Based Study of “Black” in English. Creative Education, 8, 1720-1727. doi: 10.4236/ce.2017.810117.