The color words, as the description of natural colors, constitute one of the essential lexical systems in vocabulary. Not only do they contain the sense of colors, but also embody cultural norms of different countries, making the language more vivid and meaningful. Based on the nature of the color, using the color words in a metaphorical way is able to project the specific characteristics of people and objects including time, space and status which are of abstract concepts. This paper will first analyze how this projection works in black color from Chinese and Korean linguistic point of view, and investigate its cross-domain cognition through the theoretical basis of typological, contrastive and cognitive linguistics. The results suggest that in terms of the color black, it can project the domains of concrete and abstract concepts in both Chinese and Korean. However, some of the details in each domain exhibit a slight difference. The emotional projection, for instance, the Chinese projection is far more pejorative than Korean. This can be explained by the fact that, even the adjacent location has generated similar culture between two countries, however, as time went by new elements have been added to both cultures which were considered to bring influence to people’s cognition. As a result, the projection domain in terms of using of black color has both similarities and differences in Chinese and Korean culture.

The color words, as the description of natural colors, constitute one of the essential lexical systems in vocabulary. Not only do they contain the sense of colors, but also embody cultural norms of different countries, making the language more vivid and meaningful. Based on the nature of the color, using the color words in a metaphorical way is able to project the specific characteristics of people and objects including time, space and status which are of abstract concepts. This paper will first analyze how this projection works in black color from Chinese and Korean linguistic point of view, and investigate its cross-domain cognition through the theoretical basis of typological, contrastive and cognitive linguistics. The results suggest that in terms of the color black, it can project the domains of concrete and abstract concepts in both Chinese and Korean. However, some of the details in each domain exhibit a slight difference. The emotional projection, for instance, the Chinese projection is far more pejorative than Korean. This can be explained by the fact that, even the adjacent location has generated similar culture between two countries, however, as time went by new elements have been added to both cultures which were considered to bring influence to people’s cognition. As a result, the projection domain in terms of using of black color has both similarities and differences in Chinese and Korean culture.