CHAPTER 2: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND RELATED
2.5. A BRIEF REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE
fields of linguistics, cognitive, cultural, and translation studies. In this study, idioms which are constructed around basic colour terms were elaborated in order to shed light on the similarities and dissimilarities of collocational realizations of the basic colour terms in Turkish and English idioms by providing the socio-cultural motivation behind these conceptualizations.
within a cognitive point of view in the literature abroad. One of the most influential work is Collocation and Connotation: A Corpus-Based Investigation of Color Words in English and Italian conducted by Philip (2003). Throughout her work, she emphasized that connotations of colours are not universal and the associated meanings of colours change greatly among different cultures. She provided a large amount of theoretical information on the meanings attributed to colour since the ancient times and colour meaning in different disciplines such as aesthetics, philosophy and science. In order to gather the corpus, Philip preferred to use Bank of English to collect metaphors in English and CORIS for metaphors in Italian. She revealed the frequencies of the basic colour terms in English and Italian comparing the data with that of Berlin and Kay’s. Then, she touched upon the translation equivalence of the metaphorical expressions in bilingual dictionaries.
Following this work, Philip (2006) published an article based on her dissertation which is “Connotative Meaning in English and Italian Colour-Word Metaphors”
which serves as a brief summary of her previous research. Philip’s work Colouring Meaning (2011) is made up of all her studies on the subject of colour and should be used as a reference work by researchers studying on the connotations of colour metaphors.
“A Comparative Study of Color Metaphors in English and Chinese” by He (2011) is an article which aimed to put forward the similarities and differences between the conceptual metaphors of colour expressions including only five colours- black, white, red, yellow, blue- in Chinese and English. The metaphorical expressions of colour terms were selected randomly; thus, not all the metaphorical expressions were included in the study. He demonstrated that while two languages differ in terms of the conceptualization of the five colour domains, they also share some conceptual metaphors.
“Basic Colors and Their Metaphorical Expressions in English and Persian:
Lakoff’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory in Focus” (2011) is another comparative study in which the purpose was to investigate the connotations of basic colours in English and Persian and lay out their differences in their metaphorical
mappings in two different languages. Researchers compiled metaphoric expressions of colours from different dictionaries and conducted the analysis of some of the expressions which are regarded as influential examples to demonstrate cultural variations between English and Persian society. As a result, they both revealed the commonalities and differences between the conceptualizations of colours in English and Persian.
Another important study related to the subject is “Colours We Live By?: Red and Green Metaphors in English and Spanish” (2007) which focused on the analysis of colour metaphors in order to deepen into the literal and metaphorical meanings of expressions only with green and red colours. The data was gathered from BNC (British National Corpus) for English and CREA (Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual) for Spanish consisting lexical items, idioms and collocations which demonstrated both the similarities and differences in the associations of colours in English and Spanish.
As the complete version of “A Comparative Study of Color Metaphors in English and Chinese”, a Master’s thesis conducted in Ocean University of China in 2011, is unavailable in the internet, only the abstract section could be reached.
In the abstract of the thesis, it is revealed that the study has focused on demonstrating the similarities and dissimilarities in the metaphors of basic colour terms between English and Chinese by collecting data from two corpus:
BNC and the Center for Chinese Linguistics PKU. The researcher shared the result by indicating the fact that the possible reasons for the similarities of colour metaphor in the two languages are perceptual and cultural experience, while the reasons for dissimilarities are different environment, philosophy and religion.
Another significant work is the dissertation written by Steinvall (2002), “English Colour Terms in Context” for which Steinvall collected English colour terms from the Bank of English dealing with the semantics of English colour terms within the framework of cognitive linguistics. After providing some statistical data on the usage of colour terms in English, Steinvall categorized colour terms as nouns, adjectives and adverbs and also dealt with the morphological structures of the colour terms.
Taking inspiration from the work of Steinvall, “Basic Colour Terms in English: An Examination of their Use and Meaning in English Expressions” (2007) is another important dissertation conducted in Ghent University. The aim of this study was to demonstrate why certain colour terms are used in expressions and what meanings can be expressed by them. Although the researcher included examples of metaphorical expressions of colour terms in Dutch, his study cannot be called bilingual work; as there were only several examples provided in some chapters to compare with the English expressions. He stated in his work that his aim is not to fully discuss the Dutch data and compare these expressions to the English ones. Where relevant, the Dutch expressions are mentioned as extra information (p. 2). He collected his data from several dictionaries especially from online Oxford English Dictionary. Like the other researchers, he based his study on Berlin & Kay’s and classified his data according to the semantic categories. He indicated that the meaning of many of the expressions can be derived from cultural background about colours and their associations.
In terms of the studies conducted monolinguallly in regard to the subject, “A Corpus Analysis of Color-Term Conceptual Metaphors in Persian Proverbs”
(2013) is an important work whose aims were to analyze proverbs in Persian in terms of the conceptual metaphor of colour terms and find out the commonest colours used in the proverbs and the most frequent conceptualizations those colours are associated with. The researcher revealed that the distribution of color terms among Persian proverbs is varied.
2.5.2. Studies on Colour Terms in Turkey
Although there are important studies conducted in Turkish within the framework of cognitive linguistics by mainly adopting Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Aksan 2006a, 2006b, 2011; Aksan and Kantar 2007, 2008, 2013; Aksan and Aksan 2009, 2012; Özçalışkan 2007, 2009; Öz 2011; Hastürkoğlu and Alan 2014;
Akkök 2015), it was observed while reviewing the literature that the number of cross-cultural studies conducted on the analysis of basic colour terms is low in
Turkey. “Fransızca ve Türkçe Renk İsimlerini İçeren Deyimlerin Karşılaştırmalı İncelenmesi” (A Comparative Analysis of the French and Turkish Idioms with Colour Names) by Topçu (2001) is a study providing a very limited data and trying to give a general perspective for the connotation of all the basic colours in Turkish and French. However though, while presenting the similarities and variations in Turkish and French colour idioms, the researcher did not adopt Conceptual Metaphor Theory and did not deal with the issue within a cognitive basis.
It should also be emphasized that there are monolingual studies conducted on colour terms in Turkish which are “Kara ve Siyah Renk Adlarının Türkçedeki Kavram ve Anlam Boyutu Üzerine” (2004), “Kavram ve Anlam Boyutunda Al, Kırmızı ve Kızıl” (2005a), “Kavram ve Anlam Boyutunda Türkçede Ak ve Beyaz”
(2005b), “Kavram ve Anlam Boyutunda Sarı ve Tonları” (2006), “Boz ve Kır Renk Adlarının Kavram, Anlam ve Biçim Boyutu” (2008), “Renk Adlarının Türkçede Özel Ad Yapımında Kullanımı” (2013), and “Tarihten Bugüne Yeşil Renk Adının Biçim, Anlam ve Kavram Alanı” (2014) by Bayraktar in all of which it was aimed to evaluate the value of the colour name for Turkish by finding out the frequency of use. Various dictionaries were referred to for compiling lexical items derived with the specific colour name which included names of animals and plants, medical and chemical terms, names of food and objects, nouns and adjectives related to nature, expressions related to human appearance, figurative expressions, names in Onomastics, proverbs and idioms. Then, they were classified to determine the conceptual and semantic fields of the colour name.
The related literature review demonstrated the fact that there is a gap in the literature in terms of the comparative studies conducted within the framework of cognitive linguistics on colour terms which would compare the similarities and differences between Turkish and other languages in the world.