ABSTRACT

The use of figurative language is not limited to poetry but rather pervades everyday speech. Figurative language has been vastly researched in the last years (Gibbs 1989; Moon 1998; Katz, Cacciari et al. 1998; Dobrovol’skij & Piirainen 2005; Trim 2007). As Gibbs (1998:88) points out, “the scholarly study of figurative thought and language has exploded in recent years. It seems impossible to study how people think, act, speak and interact without having to address some aspect of figurative thought and language.”

The study of figurative language has been undertaken from three perspectives: psychological, cognitive and linguistic. Psychological studies have examined people’s mental imagery of idioms (Gibbs & O’Brien 1990, Cacciari & Glucksberg 1995) and proverbs (Gibbs, Strom & Spi e??-Knowlton 1997), idiom processing (Gibbs, Bogdonovich et al. 1997) and content??-sensitive use of idioms (Nayak & Gibbs 1990, Gibbs & Nayack 1991).

Cognitive studies have addressed various issues, ranging from metaphor (Lakoff 1987, 2006; Lakoff & Turner 1980, 1989; Gibbs & Steen 1999; Kövecses 2000  XXX  ) and idiom (Langlotz 2006; Boers and Stengers 2008) to the use of conventional figurative expressions in specialized domains (Boers 1999, Mio & Katz 1996; Mussolf 2004) and figurative language teaching (Boers 2004, 2008; Beréndi, Csábi et al. 2008; Skovfaki 2008).

Finally, some scholars have postulated a corpus-based approach to metaphor analysis and figurative language learning (Cameron 1999a, b; Deignan 1999, 2008; Charteris-Black 2004; Boers 2008; MacArthur & Littlemore 2008).

 In this paper I focus on a central set of figurative expressions, those based on colour words, in the English and French languages. Indeed, colour words are frequently used to mean something other than a perceptual quality. The figurative sense of colour terms have been explained in terms of metaphorical extension (Sweetser 1990) or of the sensory properties of colours, which produce “emotion resonances” (Trim 2007: 124).

I will first  provide a classification of colour-based figurative expressions into four categories: a) idioms (look at the world through rose-colored glasses / voir la vie en rose); b) metaphors (red herring, black market;  un  bleu “ a bruise”, une nuit blanche “a sleepless night”) ; c) similes (as white as a sheet, être blanc comme neige “be candid”), and proverbs (Grass is always greener on the other side; La nuit tous les chats sont gris).

I will then proceed to the analysis of colour idioms and metaphors, the most relevant types. The analysis will reveal the similarities and differences in the patterns of colour symbolization between English and French. For example, we find equivalent or near-equivalent expressions in these languages (to see red / voir rouge, to have green fingers / avoir la main verte). Similarly, as in both languages green is used with reference to a political group (the ecological party). Further, colours are associated with certain feelings in English and French (e.g. the blue colour with sadness) and the colour idiom is often used o reinforce the emotion(to be green with envy, une colère bleue).

In contrast, a colour may symbolize different features in the two languages. It is the case of whiteness, which is associated to fear and anger in French.

Figure 1 below outlines the figurative meanings linked to colours in the first three levels of the basic colour hierarchy suggested by Berlin and Kay (1969).

The contrastive analysis shows much cross-linguistic variety, which points to the fact that figurative language is entrenched in culture.

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