A Cognitive Study on the Comparion of Basic Colour Terms in Turkish and English Idioms

Abstract

Despite the common acceptance of metaphorical language as one of the components of rhetoric since the ancient times, it has been regarded as the undeniable constituent of culture since the second half of the twentieth century. Its complex cognitive structure and its direct relation with culture have attracted the attention of many researchers. As one of the sub-category of metaphors, colours are indispensable tools of any culture and they have been studied within the framework of cognitive linguistics. This study mainly aims to investigate and compare the cognitive motivations of collocational realizations of basic colour terms in Turkish and English through a descriptive and cognitive analysis. It intends to find out the distribution and frequency of basic colour term idioms, to specify and compare the conceptual metaphors/ metonymies underlying them, their meta-domains and sub-domains, the positive, negative, or neutral qualities attributed to these idioms and interpret the findings in terms of socio-cultural and socio-cognitive structures in the minds and linguistic practices of people of Turkish and English cultures. In order to do so, a study based on specialized dictionaries on idioms is carried out and the analysis is conducted within the framework of Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory. Because of the non-existence of such a cross-cultural cognitive work on colour terms in Turkish, this study is intended to be a step towards filling this gap and be beneficial for those interested in cultural and cognitive studies, translation studies, and second- language teaching and learning.