Oi orismoi ton ODX sth NE lexikografia alexandri

2016

Portuguese colour words those that refer a colour and those that refer the colour of something or someone surface either as nouns or as adjectives. These colour words are lexically ambiguous with regard to their grammatical category. Syntax may disambiguate them (and if often does), but that disambiguation doesn’t provide enough information to understand the relationship that holds between colour nouns and colour adjectives. In this paper, I will explore different avenues (i.e. etymology, semantics, grammatical properties and contemporary usage) to discuss the following issues: From a lexical point of view, are colour nouns and colour adjectives one sole entity or two different items? If colour nouns and colour adjectives different, how do they differ? Which of them comes first? How is the other one obtained? If they are one only lexical item, how can its different outputs be generated? Do diachronic and synchronic analyses converge or diverge? The words under consideration will be ...

The present dissertation considers colour naming in three Finno-Ugric (Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian) and two Slavonic (Czech and Russian) languages. The dissertation pursues three main objectives: (1) to establish the basic colour terms in two Finno-Ugric languages, Hungarian and Finnish, and one Slavonic language, Czech; (2) to examine the intriguing case of the two reds, which are allegedly basic in Hungarian according to Berlin and Kay; and (3) to compare the denotata of focal colours of the basic colour terms identified across the three studied languages and relate these to foci in English, Russian and Estonian studied earlier by others. The theoretical background of this study is the theory of universal basic colour terms put forward by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay (1969). In field studies the author carried out 245 individual interviews in Hungary, Finland, and the Czech Republic. Data was collected using the field method developed by Davies and Corbett (1994, 1995): (i) A list task elicited a variety of colour terms in each language. Based on term frequency and mean position, salience indices of individual colour terms were inferred (Sutrop 2000, 2002), which enabled identification of the terms having basic status. (ii) In a subsequent psycholinguistic experiment, called the ‘colour naming task’, colour term mapping was carried out using the Color Aid Corporation’s set of colour tiles. A further goal of the experiment was the establishment of the focal colours for the basic colour terms in the languages of interest. The main findings of these experiments are summarised below. (1) According to the empirical fieldwork, Hungarian and Czech possess 11 basic colour terms. In Finnish, by comparison, 10 basic colour terms fulfil the criteria of basicness, while the term for purple, violetti, although not basic yet can be considered on its way to evolving to basic status. (2) Of the two Hungarian terms for ‘red’ I found that only one, piros, has basic status. The other term, vörös, reveals its cultural salience – via established collocations and connotations – but shows low frequency in elicited lists and when tiles of abstract colour are named. The possibility of two basic ‘reds’ in Czech was also examined since recently, based on work with the Czech National Corpus, it has been argued that two basic colour terms for red also exist in the Czech language (see Schmiedtová & Schmiedtová 2002, 2006). According to my fieldwork in the Czech Republic the basic term for red in Czech is červená, while rudá plays a subsidiary role, is collocation-specific and connotation-loaded, similar to vörös in Hungarian. The question of two reds in Hungarian and Czech presents a semantic question whose solution should be sought on the plane of paradigmatic vs. syntagmatic analysis, i.e. taking into account not only the colour term denotata but also distinct collocations, and as well as positive and negative emotional associations (connotations). It is suggested that the phenomenon could be tackled in terms of cultural salience, a concept which needs further development (see Rakhilina 2007). The study also refers to a possibility that the phenomenon of two reds in the languages spoken in the geographical neighbourhood is areal. However, further fieldwork also needs to be carried out in other neighbouring languages (in particular, in Slovak and Polish). (3) The dissertation also addresses the ongoing debate on focal colours, or best examples, of basic colour terms. The universalist position claims that the foci of the colour categories are identical across languages; by contrast the relativist position argues for cultural- and language-specific focal colours; and an intermediate position prefers a weak relativity solution. The latter implies that focal colours in individual languages vary, but the variability is constructed within a certain focal area. The study provides additional evidence for the hypothesis of weak relativity – by demonstrating that the focal colours deviate slightly among the three studied languages and also in comparison with focal colours in English, Russian and Estonian, studied earlier by other researchers using the same stimuli and methods.

Linguistics, 2024

Color terms show a remarkable variation in their possible lexicalization patterns across different languages. In the literature, the interest has been especially to describe the color lexicon of a certain language and to determine whether it may abide or not by Berlin and Kay’s universal evolutionary sequence, e.g., whether a certain color denomination may be considered as a basic color term, or whether a certain color category is lexicalized by more than one basic color term, by which criteria, etc. It has not been established, however, which are the most common lexical sources of basic color terms on a comparative basis, and which semantic changes are more common in this semantic field. On the basis of data drawn from 70 ancient and modern Indo-European languages, we aim at answering precisely these research questions concerning the origin and the development of basic color terms. We discuss the various lexical sources of the basic color terms for white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, gray, orange, pink, and purple, and we show the most important semantic changes leading to these color meanings. We also discuss to which extent these terms are likely to be inherited or borrowed. All this aims at being a contribution to the study of diachronic semantics. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/ling-2023-0161/html

2010

It seems that despite the undeniable fact that colour research has received considerable attention for centuries 1 resulting in more than 3000 publications during the last 150 years (MacLaury 1997 after Steinvall 2002, there still exists a niche to be filled. There has been no or very little research regarding colour terms conducted from the viewpoint of (meta)lexicography 2 . The present study is meant to evaluate existing dictionary definitions of Basic Colour Terms 3 (henceforth BCTs) from the colour lexicon of English, Japanese and Polish in order to detect any doubtful content which could be improved to equip the dictionary user with richer, more adequate information regarding the colour lexicon. The immediate aims of the study are to determine: 1) what definition types are used to define CTs 2) what prototypes extensional definitions point to when defining BCTs and how these relate to the data obtained from naive native speakers of the languages in question. To this end, two empirical investigations were conducted. The first one is devoted to dictionary definitions, while the second one is an experiment carried out among naive native speakers of the three languages.

John Benjamins Publishing Company eBooks, 2011

The paper presents the analysis of colour perception and its interpretation in psychology and symbolism; it highlights colour properties and the approaches to colour studies largely in linguistics. One of the features of colours is their ability to express human emotions and feelings, either positive or negative (verbally/ nonverbally), and to create certain atmosphere in the situation abound in colours. Shades of colours can be regarded as a lexico-semantic group formed by adjectives and nouns, which can be simple, derived, and compound words. Short texts include many colour terms expressing such colour properties, as hue, saturation, tone, lightness, intensity; each of them contributes to decoding of some culture-specific features hidden in Sudden fiction. The analysis of Sudden fiction shows that short stories have specific composition, where colour terms perform different functions. Descriptive functions are mainly connected with focal colours and identify objects' properties. Other functions, such as character-generating, associative, metaphoric, symbolic, semiotic, and culture specific are more complicated. Their identification implies additional knowledge of cultural, social, and historical planes.

GEMA Online® Journal of Language Studies, 2022

Social and cultural factors shape the linguistic perception of colour. At the same time, colour terms co-create the linguistic image of the world, which allows us to interpret reality and profile our statements and beliefs. This paper presents six basic colour terms: white, black, red, green, yellow, and blue (both as adjectives and as nouns) in the five different linguistic images of the world of the following languages: English, French, Italian, Polish, and Japanese. The methodological framework is based on cultural linguistics theory and the basis of semantics. The study explores denotative and connotative meanings of colour terms with their collocations. The data gathered from monolingual, bilingual, collocation, and phraseological dictionaries is analysed from the lexical-semantic point of view. The paper discusses semantic differences between contrasting cultures, especially in the blue-green and red lexis. Simultaneously, the findings point to transcultural and global aspects of colour meanings. Both the contexts of cultural diversity and of geographic location are emphasised in the colour semantics. Colours as linguistic signs can specify and categorise reality in terms of feelings, mental attitudes, or sensual reactions. The examined words also refer to location, nature, and the human body. The study shows that colour terms are multifunctional units in the linguistic image of the world, both in terms of the analysed languages separately and as an illustration of the cultural community of different ethnic languages.

Acta Linguistica Hungarica, 2014

A number of studies have been written on the Hungarian colour terms piros and vörös, both denoting 'red', focusing on either one of the following questions: (1) disambiguating the meanings of the two terms; or (2) their status in Hungarian as basic colour terms. The present paper attempts to resolve these issues in one go by adopting a combined approach of corpus and cognitive linguistics. The paper makes the following three hypotheses: (1) as vörös had more time to undergo idiomatization, there will be significant differences and systematic trends between the type/token ratios of the two terms; (2) piros is a more generic term used for a larger and looser range of concepts, while vörös is associated with a more limited range of concepts; and (3) piros is mostly used in its primary, literal sense, while vörös is more inclined to be used in a figurative sense. After a thorough corpus and cognitive linguistic analysis of data extracted from the updated Hungarian National Corpus, the paper comes to the general conclusion that vörös is not a basic colour term of Hungarian.

Progress in Colour Studies, 2006

In this paper, I will, first of all, present the main characteristics of property terms in European Portuguesa and then those of colour terms, focusing on the differences between the two noun categories. Then, I will briefly present the paradigm of colour naming in Portuguese. Finally, I will focus on the designation of the colour RED, which presents some characteristic features in this language.

2019