Metaphorical Comparisons with the Color Standard (Based on the Material of Russian Literary Discourse)

About the author:

Rumyantseva Marina V., Cand. Sci. (Phylol.), Associate Professo, Department of Philological Disciplines, Tyumen State Medical University; m.rumjanzewa@rambler.ru; ORCID: 0000-0002-7949-8360

Abstract:

Modern linguistic studies of cultural manifestations of different ethnic groups that found their place in the language prove that language affects how a person perceives the world around him or her. The language creates a naive picture of the world, which is based on popular wisdom and knowledge of cultural ethnic or universal human norms and traditions. This picture has its own unique laws, different from the scientific picture of the world, dictates its own categories of space and time, as well as color and function.

This article presents a linguoculturological analysis of metaphorical comparisons with a color standard to identify regular metaphorization models, the frequency of choice of a particular comparison agent, which indicates a subject of thought that does not have a conventional color meaning in the language. This study focuses on metaphoric coloratives in Russian fiction of the 20^th century. The metaphorical comparisons-coloratives were selected by continuous sampling in the amount of 275 units, while the analysis covered lexemes-agents.

The results show that the main colors of figurative comparisons-coloratives of the literary discourse were yellow, red, white, black, brown, gray, green, and blue. A classification of reference color agents is compiled, containing seven semantic groups, which can be correlated with both agents and references comparison, which allows using the formula of the semantic comparison structure. As a result, the quantitative indicators of formulas for different coloratives were obtained, with phytomorphs being the most frequent standards of red, yellow, brown, blue, and green. The second place belongs to reamorphs, which are rich, but not the only source of black standards. Naturmorphs are in the third place; these are the suppliers of agents of black, as well as yellow and gray. They are followed by gluttomorphs, which are the leading white standards. Zoomorphs are uniformly present in almost all colors except brown and blue. A small number of anthropomorphs agents are red standards, and hemo­morphs agents are green standards.

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