Language, Culture and Identity – Signs of Life

This paper makes a study from the perspective of cognitive semantics of Chinese non-basic color terms, the subcategories of color terms, on their representation, cognitive motivation and cultural connotation. It is found that there are four major representation forms of non-basic color terms in Chinese: object color terms, proper noun color terms, color terms denoting degree, color terms denoting mixed color. The major cognitive motivations are metaphor, metonymy and conceptual integration. The