摘 要

语言词汇是随着社会的发展而不断变化的。颜色词作为语汇的一个重要组成部分，对社会经济、文化、科技等的变化的反应最敏感、最直接。汉语颜色词“红”意义的产生和发展是复杂因素共同作用的结果。国内外学者分别从文化、语用、民族等角度研究“红”的寓意演变，揭示出“红色”的丰富内涵及其在汉民族语言中的独特地位。本文选取了政治、经济、文化三个角度，在社会语言学的视角下对颜色词“红”进行共时和历时的研究，分析“红”在中文中的寓意演变，以期使人们对于“红色”的寓意及运用有更深层次的认识和了解。同时在社会语言学视角下对汉语颜色词“红”的寓意演变进行研究，从一个侧面彰显了词汇作为语言符号系统中的一个重要组成部分对客观世界的标记功能，拓展了汉语颜色词的研究领域。全文共三个部分，第一部分为绪论，阐明了该论文的目的,相关研究以及中西学者在此领域所取得的成果。第二部分仔细探讨了在社会语言学视角下颜色词“红”的寓意演变。第三部分为结论，总结了论文研究的重要性、必要性以及局限性。

关键词：红色；社会语言学；寓意演变

Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 Demonstration 3

2.1 Framework of Sociolinguistics 3

2.1.1 The Basic Concepts and Theory of Sociolinguistics 3

2.1.2 The Relationship between Sociolinguistic and Semantic Evolution. 5

2.1.2.1 The Need of the Life of Social Culture 5

2.1.2.2 The Development of Economy 5

2.1.2.3 The Innovation of Politics 6

2.1.2.4 The Development of Science and Technology 6

2.2 The Semantic Forms of “Red” 6

2.2.1 Literal Meaning 7

2.2.2 Extended Meaning 7

2.2.2.1 Metaphor 7

2.2.2.2 Synaesthesia 8

2.2.2.3 Symbolism 8

2.3 The Social Causes of the Semantic Evolution of “Red” 9

2.3.1 The Synchronic Analysis of Social Causes 10

2.3.1.1 Political Cause 10

2.3.1.2 Economic Cause 11

2.3.1.3 Cultural Cause 11

2.3.2 The Diachronic Analysis on Social Causes 11

2.3.2.1 The Development in Ancient Time (before 1840) 11

2.3.2.2 The Development in Modern Time (1840--1949) 12

2.3.2.3 The Development in Contemporary Time (1949--now) 12

3 Conclusion 13

Works Cited ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------14

Bibliography------------------------------------------------------------------------------------15

A Study of Semantic Evolution of “Red” in Chinese from the Perspective of Sociolinguistics

1 Introduction

Since the world we live in is full of plenty of colors, a variety of color words need to be designated and described. Colors have for a long time aroused great interest from experts of multi-disciplines, including physics, neurology, cognitive science, philosophy, psychology, linguistics and anthropology, which have made great contributions to the aspects of human color vision. The study of color words on the linguistic aspect is fruitful, too. “Linguistically, it is noted that the most important achievements in research on the color lexicon have always gone with breakthroughs in science and technology at a given time and have often taken place as the result of interdisciplinary or multi-disciplinary endeavors in germane fields.”(Yang, 2002)

1.1 A Review of Researches on Color Terms

Color is a universal phenomenon and the world we live in is a colorful world. Color study has a long history in western countries. The earliest can be traced back to ancient Greek—Plato and Aristotle who made the earliest philosophical study of colors. From then on, scholars explored color terms in different perspectives, including philosophy, anthropology, ethnography, psychology, linguistics, sociolinguistics, etc. The researches on color terms both abroad and at home will be relatively introduced in the following section.

1.2 Research on Color Terms Abroad

Color terms have been a research object early in the West. Color terms and their emergence have been the hot research issues for linguists, anthropologists, sociologists, etc. It’s about 2500years ago that color was first studied systematically by Plato whose classic reasoning for perceiving colors has been “repeated with only slight variation for 2500years and carried into the physical sciences as a basic assumption about the nature of color”(Sloane,1991:168). Taking human-beings’ perception of color as the starting point, scholars conduct color research mainly from the following perspectives:

To count the number of color terms in different languages and compare its diversity between different nations;