The Embodiment of Color Conceptualization in English – a Model of color as Both Source and Target Domains

This paper proposes an original idealized cognitive model of color conceptualization in English. Color has been used to discuss many distinctive linguistic phenomena: e.g. universality vs. relativity, categorization, prototypes, primitives, vantage theory, metaphor, metonymy, embodiment, frames, domains, summary scanning, minimal concepts, grammatical classes, subclasses, and most recently, “the language myth”. Nonetheless, a model of the frame of COLOR has been lacking. Cognitive linguistics establishes a central role to meaning through the ideas of embodied experience and cognitive models that are evinced through usage-based analysis of constructions and conceptualization, frequency and distribution in corpus analysis, and psycholinguistic analysis of speaker judgment, salience, reaction time, and implicit associations. The proposed model reassumes research of the past eight years that has employed these empirical methods. It culminates in five types of distinction in a conceptual mapping of color. The mapping reveals the conceptualization process as surmised from usage of color terms in contemporary American English. The idealized cognitive model of color mapping in English proposes an organization of linguistic knowledge through primary embodied conceptual correlations in experience that are established through the dynamic interactions and conceptual integration of COLOR both as a source and a target domain.