Abstract: Culture is the basis for the survive and development of the human society, and language is one of the elements to constitute the large-scale cultural systems. The reciprocity of the semantics and culture between English and Chinese reflects the cultural background of the two languages ,the cultural similarities and differences. In English and Chinese, there are a variety of color words and they have different cultural and historical backgrounds, religious beliefs, aesthetic psychology. This makes the color words have different meanings and connotations. In Western countries or China, black and white reflect different cultural backgrounds. In this paper, a comparative analysis on the basic symbolism and cultural connotations of black and white is conducted, so as to explore how to understand the profound meaning of the language and acquire information from the culture, and improve cross-cultural communicative competence of foreign language learners.
Key words: color words; culture connotation; black; white
摘要：文化是生存和发展的基础，在人类社会中，语言是很多元素构成的大型文化系统。英语和汉语的语义与文化之间的互通点比较少。通过比较英汉语颜色词的异同,反映了文化背景的异同。在英语和汉语中，颜色词很丰富，由于英汉语拥有不同的文化和历史背景，宗教信仰，审美心理，所以颜色词的隐含意义也不同。在西方或中国，黑色和白色体现了不同的文化背景。本文比较分析了黑色和白色的基本象征意义和文化意义，并探讨理解语言的深刻含义和从文化中获取信息，从而提高外语学习者的跨文化交际能力。
关键词:颜色词;文化内涵;黑;白
