Conceptual and Connotative Meanings of Black and White Colours: Examples from Jordanian Arabic

This paper aims at investigating the conceptual and connotative meanings of the black and white colours as used in the Jordanian society in order to find out the role played by culture in shaping the meaning of lexical items. The results show that all the participants of the study interpret the target expressions according to their connotative meanings rather than lexical ones. The major finding of the study is white colour suggests positive meaning whereas black colour suggests negative meaning; however, few expressions do not follow this pattern such as, ‘his eye is white’, ‘white death’ and ‘black horse’.