A corpus analysis of color-term conceptual metaphors employed in Albanian proverbs

AuthorArben Gaba
Position'Eqrem Cabej' University, Department of Foreign Languages, English Branch, Faculty of Education and Social Sciences
Pages219-224
219
Vol. 3 No. 3
January, 2018
Balkan Journal of Interdisciplinary Research
IIPCCL Publishing, Graz-Austria
ISSN 2410-759X
Acces online at www.iipccl.org
A corpus analysis of color-term conceptual metaphors employed in Albanian
proverbs
Arben Gaba
“Eqrem Cabej” University, Department of Foreign Languages, English Branch, Faculty of
Education and Social Sciences
Abstract
This paper talks about the use of color terms in Albanian proverbs in four Albanian proverb
books and their metaphoric associations in the users’ minds, ideas, beliefs, world outlook
and values. Our corpus which consists of 51 proverbs containing colour terms was selected
by painstakingly going through 6482 proverbs found in the respective books. The results
suggested that colors enjoy an uneven distribution in Albanian proverbs, with black and white
having the lion’s share, serving as the colours of opposition; also, the meaning of colours is
not unidirectional on the contrary colour terms have both positive and negative connotations.
Furthermore, conceptual metaphors seem to be part and parcel of our system of thinking
and they are present in every eld of human undertaking and language users should have a
sucient degree of familiarity with the maer when encountering such expressions.
Keywords: Colour terms, proverbs, conceptual metaphor.
1. Introduction
Metaphor and its sister literary trope, metonymy, are grounded in experience.
Humans tend to compare things in their day-to -day interactions that according to
Lako and Johnson (1980: 3), ‘our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which
we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature’. Thus conceptual
metaphor is a way which helps us understand two dierent domains: one thing in
terms of something else, something more concrete in nature in terms of something
more abstract. Thus the essence of a metaphor is a set of ontological correspondences
which entails a set of systematic correspondences between the entities of one domain
and that of the other. However, true as it is that conceptual metaphor enables us to
conceptualize one mental domain in term of another it is also true that metaphorical
concepts seem to be part of a cline of metaphoricity: some are universal, others are
fairly widespread, and some are culture-specic Lako, (1993: 245). Among the many
realities found in these metaphoric concepts, is also that of colour. Colour terms
are widely used in various domains in their literal or metaphoric senses and are a
major giveaway of the world outlook of the dierent kind of philosophical thinkings
which shape the mental models of dierent peoples. Expressions containing colour
terms are found in all kinds of language in the literal and non-literal ones. They are
thus found in formulaic language, in such genres as, riddles, proverbs, aphorisms,
clichés, idioms etc,. Proverbs stand out as the most general folklore genre. According
to N.R. Norrick "Proverb is a traditional, conversational genre, didactic with a
general meaning genre, a relatively free conversational direction, preferentially with
gurative meaning.” (1985: 78) In it are reected the rich history of the people, their
ideas related to every possible aspect of life, such as, work, art, culture, death, war,
basically their whole existence. They have been collected since antiquity and have

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