Conceptual and Connotative Meanings of Black and White Colours: Examples from Jordanian Arabic (original) (raw)
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This paper aims at investigating the conceptual and connotative meanings of the black and white colours as used in the Jordanian society in order to find out the role played by culture in shaping the meaning of lexical items. The results show that all the participants of the study interpret the target expressions according to their connotative meanings rather than lexical ones. The major finding of the study is white colour suggests positive meaning whereas black colour suggests negative meaning; however, few expressions do not follow this pattern such as, ‘his eye is white’, ‘white death’ and ‘black horse’. Keywords: culture, meaning, colour-words, connotation, intention, Jordanian Arabic
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How Colours are Semantically Construed in the Arabic and English Culture: A Comparative study
Most works in cognitive semantics have been focusing on the manner, in which an individual behaves -be it the mind, brain, or even computers, which process various kinds of information. Among humans, in particular, social life is richly cultured. Sociality and culture are made possible by cognitive studies; they provide specific inputs to cognitive processes . The current work focussed on the use of colours as a term throughout the Arabic and English culture. In fact, one colour may imply different meanings at the same place, and this makes us ponder on how colours are construed in cross cultural diversity? In this vein, the current work referred to the etymological meaning of the colour terms, and provided six basic Arabic colour terms and cross to six English colour terms. Using the cognitive cultural categorization for each colour term, three different meanings were identified -basic meaning, extended meaning and additional meaning. 'Basic meaning' refers to the original meaning of the colour term, whereas 'extended meaning' refers to the meaning extended from the original meaning throughout human experience and 'additional meaning' refers to the meaning which has been further abstracted from the extended meaning. Thus, the aim of this work was to show how meanings of colours are identified in the different cultures of Arabic and English, and in the way whereby both languages are relevant and different for each colour term. www.ccsenet.org/elt English
Colour Idioms in English and Arabic: Their Meaning and Colour Associations
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Colour-Related Idiomatic Expressions in English and Kurdish
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Colour is a powerful communication tool and can convey different positive and negative messages. Apart from their denotative meanings, colours have different connotations in different languages and cultures. Many of these connotations are very clearly observed in their use of colour idiomatic expressions. This study explores the different meanings and connotations of the basic colour terms[1] and their usage in idiomatic expressions in English and Kurdish to find out areas of similarity and difference between them. To this end data were collected from different English dictionaries and from English idiom dictionaries; while for the Kurdish idiomatic expressions data were collected from Kurdish idiom books (See methodology 4.1 &4.2). The findings obtained from the analysis of the data show that despite similarities in the number of the basic colour terms and their general meanings and connotations in the two languages, the symbolic use of the colour terms in idiomatic expressions i...
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