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COGNITIVE MODELING OF COLOR NAMING IN RUSSIAN AND CHINESE // Tomsk State Pedagogical University Bulletin. 2018. Issue 6 (195). P. 81-87

The article is devoted to revealing poorly studied cognitive mechanisms of color naming in Russian and Chinese on the basis of lexicographic and Internet sources, and the national corpus of the Russian and Chinese languages. Derivative secondary colorants denoting tertiary chromatic colors have been analyzed. Cognitive color naming models related to the cognitive macro model “color plant” have been identified. This allows us to conclude that the color picture of the world reflects diverse experience of man’s knowledge of the plant world in all its forms. Ways of replenishing the color naming system of this type have been defined. The color naming systems in the Russian and Chinese languages with respect to the type of cognitive modeling being analyzed are basically the same. The authors have found out universal cognitive color naming models of Russian and Chinese, among which the most productive ones are the models “color flower”, “color fruit of the plant”, which indicates the similarity of thought processes realizing color naming. National features of the color picture of the world are manifested in the presence of specific nominations of color shades in both languages. These nominations reflect cultural characteristics of Russian and Chinese native speakers as well as peculiarities of the color semantics of interlingual equivalents in the languages. Quantitative and qualitative differences of Russian and Chinese derived color lexical units confirm the idea that the color naming is the reflection of the natural and cultural space of the ethnos.

Keywords: cognitive modeling, color naming, coloration, Russian, Chinese