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This article explores the products of conceptual engineering in contemporary media communication and mass culture. The analysis examines the mechanisms and communicative consequences of intentionally creating color categories. The shade known as peach fuzz, selected by the Pantone Institute as the color of the year 2024, is used as a case study. It is shown that in the case of the color of the year, the transmission of the conceptual idea involves two channels simultaneously (visual and verbal), each in two different forms. The author notes that the visual channel is used to ostensively present the shade with specific chromatic characteristics and to develope a complex visual image on this basis. Special attention is paid to the verbal channel, which is utilized in the form of intentionally constructed color designations and supporting stories (conceptual myths). It is concluded that from the perspective of color communication, verbal and visual texts serve fundamentally different functions. The visual representation shows how the viewer should see the color, while the verbal explanation clarifies why this shade is needed. It is demonstrated that the image embedded in the color name sets the desired connotation, which can transform the perception of the shade by adding necessary meanings to it. The verbal story defines a cognitive “point of view” for introducing a new category into an existing color system.

This paper presents a review of neuro-linguistic studies on color categorization, developed using the oddball paradigm. The selection of research sources was conducted through Russian National Corpus, Google Scholar, Scopus, Web of Science. This study undertook a comprehensive analysis of all relevant articles published within the last 15 years (with the earliest dating back to 2007). Through this analysis, traditional methodologies were identified and five thematic groups of research were established, all of which employed the oddball paradigm. The focus of neuro-linguistic research has been shown to be directed towards (1) studying the neurophysiological mechanisms of color categorization and their temporal parameters; (2) investigating the mechanisms of color categorization in preverbal infants; (3) examining the effect of lateralization; (4) analyzing inter- and intra-linguistic differences in color categorization; and (5) determining the neurophysiological correlates of artificial color categories. Paying particular attention to experimental design, principles of stimulus chromatic characteristics selection, and the results obtained by the authors will enable specialists in the field of theoretical, applied, and comparative linguistics to use the review presented in this article as a basis for planning and developing new experimental research in this area.

The results of a comprehensive study of color names derived from the names of colored stones in the system of color names of the modern Russian language are presented in the article. The research was conducted in 2018-2020 in two stages using the methods of content analysis and an online psycholinguistic experiment. At the first stage, the state of the semantic group of names of colored stones, potential objects-referents of color names, was assessed by analyzing four different groups of sources: specialized dictionaries of colored stones, dictionaries of color, individual author's dictionaries of color names and explanatory dictionaries of the modern Russian language. At the second stage, the state of the color terms formed from the names of colored stones in the active vocabulary of modern Russian speakers was investigated on the basis of data from an online psycholinguistic experiment, in which 2,457 people aged 16 to 95 took part. The results of a comparative analysis of the lists of colored stones-prototypes of color names in the passive and active dictionaries of the speakers of the modern Russian language are presented. The scope of denotation and the function of color names derived from the names of colored stones are considered. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of the derivative productivity of the names of referent objects of the studied class and the frequency of use of individual color names in the responses of Russian speakers with different socio-demographic characteristics (gender, age, professional experience).

The principles of the selection of Russian terms of the sphere of conservation and restoration of wall paintings and architectural surfaces in the multilingual lexicographic representation of the illustrated dictionary “EwaGlos” are considered. It allowed for the first time in domestic and world practice to bring into the system the terms of this sphere that have developed in Russian and harmonize them with the terminological systems of fourteen others languages — English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Bulgarian, Croatian, Turkish, Polish, Romanian, Hungarian, Japanese, Arabic and Persian. The results of a quantitative analysis of Russian terms at several levels are presented: (1) structural (in terms of the number of components), (2) part of speech (in terms of the distribution of parts of speech that implement terminological functions), (3) etymological (in terms of the origin of terms and main ways of terminology enrichment), (4) morphological (from the point of view of the morphemic structure of terms and words), (5) syntactic (from the point of view of models of constructing terms and phrases), (6) lexical (from the point of view of stratification of terms and types of terminological names), (7) logical-semantic (from the point of view of the taxonomy of terms, hypo- and hyperonymic relations).