Metaphoricity of colour terms in Kurdish

Abstract EN

Colour terms are very widely used in everyday life in such a way that it has become an inseparable part of human life and language.

This common use of colour terms has in turn led to being loaded with extra attributive and connotative meanings in addition to their literal and lexical meanings.

The extra meanings of colour terms vary from a culture into another .In Kurdish language, colour terms have similarly acquired several metaphorical meanings which can be considered unique.

Like most of the languages of the world, 'black' and ' white' have the greatest number of metaphorical expressions in Kurdish compared to other colour terms.

These extra meanings are all derived from the original meaning of the colour term through extension and abstraction.

The paper aims at discovering the process through which these terms acquire extra extended and abstract meaning in Kurdish.

The method is corpus based.

As many example of such colour term expressions have been collected in dictionaries and everyday speech by the researcher.

Then the collected data is analyzed to point out the uniqueness of the process and how each one acquires the extra meanings.

The most outstanding finding of the study is that these extended and abstract meanings are mostly derived from the original meaning through the process of metaphoricalization and metonymization.