Semantic Distributions of the Color Terms, Black and White in Taiwanese Languages

Copyright 2012 by Huei-ling Lai and Shu-chen Lu 26th Pacific Asia Conference on Language,Information and Computation pages 163–170 Semantic Distributions of the Color Terms, Black and White in Taiwanese Languages Huei-ling Lai Shu-chen Lu National Chengchi University / National Chengchi University / 64, Sec.2, Zhinan Rd., Wenshan District, 64, Sec.2, Zhinan Rd., Wenshan District, Taipei 11605, Taiwan Taipei 11605, Taiwan hllai@nccu.edu.tw 96555006@nccu.edu.tw Abstract This study, based on a variety of data sources, investigates the linguistic and cultural characteristics associated with the black and white expressions among Taiwanese Mandarin, Taiwanese Hakka, and Taiwanese Southern Min. The meaning distributions of the data profile four types: prototypical meanings, metonymic extensions, metaphorical extensions and idiosyncratic examples; and the associated cultural factors are examined. Some meaning extensions are widespread across the three languages, whereas some are language-specific because of cultural roots. Among the three languages, Taiwanese Mndarin develops the most prolific usages and this may be ascribed to the prosperity of cultural, economic or technological developments of the language. 1 Introduction Studies of color terms can be found in fields like linguistics, psychology, neurophysiology or anthropology. The earlier representative work from a linguistic perspective can be attributed to Berlin and Kay’s (1969) investigation of 98 languages, in which all languages are claimed to share similarity regarding the foci of basic color terms and to have similar evolutionary stages regarding color terms. Some studies (e.g. Derrig, 1978) propose cross-cultural generality in the extensional meanings of basic color terms and other studies (e.g. Wierzbicka, 1996) probe into human understanding of color terms based on conceptual prototypes. Black and white are universally perceptible to all mankind and are the only two colors at stage one in Berlin and Kay’s (1969) sequence of color evolution. Speakers of Taiwanese Mandarin (TM), Taiwanese Hakka (TH) and Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM) also share some similarities in the usages of the color terms black and white. However, while the three languages are so contiguous geographically in Taiwan, variations exist among usages of color terms, some of which are due to cultural factors. Hence, investigating the usages of the color terms black and white in TM, TH and TSM, we aim to uncover the similarities and variations in the meaning extensions of black and white, and further to find the cultural factors behind them. 1.2 The Data The TM data are collected from MOE Revised Mandarin Chinese Dictionary, Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus of Mandarin Chinese and The NCCU Corpus of Spoken Chinese, and are transcribed into 漢語拼音 Hàn-yŭ Pīn-yīn ‘Mandarin spelling’ Phonetic Symbols. Taiwan Google Research Engine is also used to double check whether the data from the Chinese dictionary belong to Taiwanese Mandarin. Proper names are excluded. In total, 209 tokens of 黑 hēi ‘black’ color terms and 362 tokens of 白 bái ‘white’ color terms are found. The TH data are gathered from MOE Taiwanese Hakka Dictionary of Common Words, The NCCU Corpus of Spoken Taiwanese Hakka, 163 26th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Compuation pages 163-170 Copyright 2012 by …

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