Colours We Live by?: Red and Green Metaphors in English and Spanish
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Abstract
This paper aims to deepen into the nature of motivation and into the literal and metaphorical continuum of colour expressions for red and green in English and Spanish. We focus on the analysis of colour metaphors in relation to concepts different from those of emotions, in non-literary texts, and where synaesthesia is not the only motivation. Our corpus consists of lexical items, idioms and collocations where colour contributes to meaning, taken from the BNC (English) and the CREA (Spanish). The study shows that a) the literal-metaphorical cline cannot always be observed within the same expression; b) the importance of the centre of the cline made up of chains of entailments is predominantly based on cultural knowledge, as well as on value judgements assigned to colours by the language community.
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