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This study on the exploration of colour terms: A comparative study of colour description in Nigerian and Ghanaian Englishes is a qualitative study of colour terms as it is used in the fashion domain by two West African varieties of English language. The study describes shades of colours by Nigerian and Ghanaian speakers of English language. The theory adopted two theories namely, Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Linguistics Relativity. The systemic functional linguistics is adopted because of the choices that people make in meaning explication while linguistic relativity is adopted because of the way the world is differently experienced and conceived in different linguistic communities. More so, humans have different perspective of the world and this is reflected through the languages spoken in their various communities. Data were randomly collected from Nigerians and Ghanaians who are into weaving of native attires. The data were obtained in written and audio-record format. Fifteen (15) colour terms were obtained for each of the varieties. The study reveals those Nigerians and Ghanaians speaker of English name colours after item peculiar to their immediate environment and culture. The paper concludes that further research needs to be carried out in order to develop a framework that could account for the meaning of colours in indigenous languages both in Nigeria and Ghana and possibly other West African languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Old Frisian lexicon contains two words for 'blue': wēden , related to OE wǣden (MoE woaden arch.), OHG weitīn (MoG waiden arch.), and MLG wêden , with adjectival suffix *- īna stemming from PGmc * waida-, waidina- 'woad, plant yielding blue dye'. The other one is blāw , a loanword through Middle Dutch or Middle Low German (from French), which is cognate with OE blǣhǣwen , OHG blāo, plāo , and ON blár , from PGmc * blēwa- < IE * bhel- 'shining' (cf. Lat. flavus 'golden yellow'). This article analyses the occurrences of the words wēden and blāw in the Old Frisian text corpus in order to determine and contextualize the various semantic fields covered by these lexemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review article aims to provide an overview of the works published in the last decades on colour terminology and categorisation in some African languages1, and Hausa and Swahili in particular. It gives information about different African languages (Ndebele, Setswana, Xhosa, Chichewa, Egyptian-Coptic, Himba and Chakali), then it traces the main works covering the area of Hausa and Swahili language, from the earliest papers until now. Even though these languages have a rich tradition of studies, the amount of works devoted to colour naming is fairly limited. The theoretical approaches of the studies that have appeared in the last few decades are rather heterogeneous, and include perspectives from lexical semantics, cognitive semantics and sociolinguistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eleanor Farjeon belonged to the most popular British authors writing for children in the first decades of the 20th century. However, very few of her stories have appeared in translation. There are no translations of her major work, Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard, and its sequel, Marin Pippin in the Daisy Field, into German, French, Spanish, Russian, or the Scandinavian languages. Yet, the Martin Pippin books have been translated into Polish, by Hanna Januszewska. In Eleanor Farjeon's work, sound effects play a central role. Her texts are multimodal in many aspects, but rhyme, wordplays, and linguistic jokes pose the utmost challenge to translators. The article investigates the exponents of multimodality in Farjeon's books and their equivalents in the Polish version. The theoretical framework is the translation shift approach [Vinay and Darbelnet 1958/1995] and its later extensions. The conclusion is that Hanna Januszewska's translation is an almost perfect example of functional equivalence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Of all the semantic domains, colour terms have attracted the largest amount of attention, notably from a typological point of view. However, there is much more to be discovered. A search of the cross-linguistic lexical database of African languages (RefLex) reveals several previously undetected areal colexification patterns and shared lexico-constructional patterns in a genetically balanced sample of 401 languages. In this paper, we illustrate several areal characteristics of colour terms: (i) the spread of an areal feature due to a common extra-linguistic setting (locust bean – Parkia biglobosa – as the lexical source of yellow); (ii) two convergence phenomena, one based on a shared lexico-constructional pattern including a term for water, and one based on shared colexifications (red and ripe vs. green and unripe); and (iii) an areal pattern of lexical diffusion of colour ideophones, a category which has thus far been considered difficult to borrow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Philologia is the property of Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article deals with the terms of colours as a very important component of language picture of the world. The paper focuses upon the specific features of colour terms on the basis of comparative study of chromatic lexemes.

The aim of the paper is to present the results of a study of psychological salience of colour terms for women and men who are native speakers of Russian. In our study, we employed the elicitation list task which is a five-minute psychological test designed to determine which and to what degree colour terms are psychologically important to language users. There were 26 Russian speakers -- 13 women and 13 men -- who participated in the test. The test results provide us with adequate material to be used to analyze both quantitative and qualitative differences between the female and male colour lexicons, and additionally, to estimate the scope of these differences. The study confirms the observations made by other researchers, as well as the popular opinion that women have a richer selection of colour words at their disposal and that they actually know many more metonymic colour terms than men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary theory on metaphor states that metaphor is conceptual, conventional, and part of the ordinary system of thought and language. It has been argued that metaphors can become a translation problem, since transferring them from one language and culture to another may be restricted by linguistic and cultural differences. We investigated how colour metaphors are translated from English into Estonian. To understand how metaphors are translated, a cognitive empirical study was carried out with 21 colour metaphors. The experiment was conducted with two separate groups of volunteers. The first group participated in a context-based translation task, the second in a context-free one.

Copyright of Linguistica Uralica is the property of Teaduste Akadeemia Kirjastus and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This research contributes to the study of colour terms as a cognitive phenomenon. Since colour is not a universal concept and an ordinary mind does not perceive colour separately from the object, it is possible to observe the knowledge about colour, which exists in the lan­guage but does not exist in its physical sense. We hold that the given knowledge is the cause of significant difficulties arising in the translation of various colour terms, though the nature of these terms existence should not be complex in its essence, being a basic phenomenon of the natural world. Moreover, certain ambiguity rises when reference points of colour do not coin­cide with the indirect naming of colours and shades in different languages. Different pairs of languages apparently set their individual spectrum of translation difficulties. We characterise some typical colour-related English into Russian translation difficulties which arise at the cognitive level.

Brent Berlin and Paul Kay brought a sea change in semantic studies of colour terms when they published their book Basic Color Terms in 1969. Up to that point the dominant view was that each language represented a unique conceptual organisation of the world, a view supported by the fact that the colour spectrum is a continuum which provides not obvious breaks for the purposes of naming. Despite the many criticisms of their work which have followed, their methodology has proven extremely infl uential and been widely adopted. The project Evolution of Semantic Systems, 2011–2012, adopted their methodology for a study of colour terms in the Indo-European languages and the Colours in Context project applied the same methods to a study of Icelandic Sign Language. Signed languages diff er in many ways from spoken languages but the results of this study suggest the broad organisation of the colour space is the same in Icelandic Sign Language, Icelandic and British English. The colour space is organised by a few dominant terms, largely the same as Berlin and Kay ́s original basic colour terms. Yet within that broad patt ern is considerable microvariation, especially in the spaces between the dominant terms. There the characteristic patt erns of word formation in the language have a clear influence in colour naming strategies.

This paper focusses on colour terminology as a tool for achieving ἐνάργεια (pictorial vividness) in the Latin poetry of the first century c.e. After briefly outlining the developments in the concept of ἐνάργεια from Aristotle to Quintilian, the paper considers the use of Latin terms for black in three descriptive passages from Statius' epic poem, the Thebaid. It is observed that the poet privileges the juxtaposition of the two adjectives ater and niger in a pattern of uariatio, where ater often carries a figurative meaning and repeats established poetic clichés, while niger is part of unparalleled collocations that evoke a material notion of blackness. Further analysis of the uariatio in the context of each passage reveals that the juxtaposition of the two-colour terms enhances the vividness of the objects described not only by increasing their chromatic impact but also by establishing connections with other parts of the poem, and by inviting a reflection on the competing practices of imitation and transgression of poetic models. The analysis of one stylistic feature (the use of colour terms in uariatio) shows that this stylistic feature is used by Statius for achieving ἐνάργεια as an artistic effect, for reflecting on ἐνάργεια as an instrument through which poetic models are challenged, and for tying his own poetic practice to contemporary rhetorical discussions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The meaning of χλωρός in Rev 6.8 has been given a variety of interpretations (green, yellow, pale, vigorous etc.) due to its polysemic character; that is, it possesses a chromatic as well as an achromatic meaning and, in addition, if it denotes colour, can express a wide spectrum of hues. From this arises the need for a methodology that offers not merely a gloss, but rather a 'meaning'. This methodology is based on: an analysis of the text; the use of the term; the concept of colour that existed in antiquity and the entity in which the colour was embodied; and the use of various lexicographical tools provided by the field of cognitive linguistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Colour plays a key role in people's communication. Languages represent the gradation of colours in nature by a series of discrete categories. These categories of colour differ along with the different cultures. Colour distinctions and meanings also play a major role in different religions. A certain colour may have a particular meaning in Christianity and another different meaning. There is no single language is said to include all colour variations. Colour distinctions and meanings play a major role in different religions. A certain colour may have a particular meaning in Christianity and another different meaning. This paper aims at identifying the basic colour terms in the Glorious Qur'an and making structural and semantic analyses of them. It is hypothesized that the Glorious Qur'an contains particular colour terms that occupy various grammatical classes and indicates specific functions. Furthermore, some are linked to each other by semantic relations. The major findings arrived at are the following: there are six basic colour terms used in the Glorious Qur'an; they are white, black, green, yellow, blue, and red. Colour terms used in the Glorious Qur'an have various structures in Arabic syntax. Secondly, semantic variations are found in many verses of the Glorious Qur'an that include colour terms. Thirdly, cultural differences affect the usage of colour in language. Finally, the use of colour terms in the Glorious Qur'an is meant to apply different functions of the terms, such as the visual, the aesthetic, the symbolic, and the expressive functions. one colour might be interpreted in one way in a language and in a totally different way in another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks into the category membership of colour words that enter into combination with modifiers like bright, dark, light, or pale. The English grammatical literature usually assumes that these ‘composite colour strings’, used attributively or predicatively, form adjective-adjective compounds. Closer scrutiny, however, reveals difficulties with this view. First, it is unusual for adjectives to modify adjectives. Second, even if they are compounds, it is unusual for their comparative and superlative inflections to be marked not on the head of the structure, but internally on the modifier, as in brighter red. These difficulties lead us to question the compoundhood of those strings, but also to explore the possibility that, at least in some predicative and attributive uses, the colour words in them are nouns. Using data from the BNC and COCA, we test our intuitions and those found in the literature. We conclude that the adjective-adjective compound analysis of composite colour strings cannot be generalised to all predicative and attributive uses. In at least some of those, the colour word is a noun. In some other cases, it may not be possible to decide if the colour word is a noun or an adjective.

In this study, we linguistically investigated Serbian colour terminology. We administrated colourterm elicitation task aiming to establish the inventory of basic colour terms (BCTs) in the Serbian language and, in particular, to investigate the salience and the status of colour terms teget ‘dark blue’ and bordo ‘dark red’. Native speakers of Serbian (N = 83) participated in a list task (Morgan & Corbett, 1989), in which they had to list as many Serbian colour terms as possible during five minutes. Based on the collected data, we calculated frequency of each term, its mean position and two indexes of salience. Results showed that 11 Serbian most salient colour terms correspond to the eleven BCTs found by Berlin and Kay (1969), namely, plavo ‘blue’, crveno ‘red’, žuto ‘yellow’, zeleno ‘green’, crno ‘black’, belo ‘white’, ljubičasto ‘purple’, narandžasto ‘orange’, sivo ‘grey’, roze ‘pink’, and braon ‘brown’, but that basic status of braon needs to be further examined. Teget ‘dark blue’ and bordo ‘dark red’, along with tirkizno ‘turquoise’ and oker ‘ochre’ were frequently used, with higher salience indices than other non-BCTs. Further research is needed to find out whether teget and bordo meet criteria of BCTs in the Serbian language. [Project of the Serbian Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development, Grant no. 179033 and Grant no. III47020]

Colour categories are acquired through learning, but the nature of this process is not fully understood. Some category distinctions are defined by hue (e.g. red/purple) but other by lightness (red/pink). The aim of this study was to investigate if the acquisition of key information for making accurate cross-boundary discriminations poses different challenges for hue-defined as opposed to lightness-defined boundaries. To answer this question, hue- and lightness-learners were trained on a novel category boundary within the GREEN region of colour space. After training, hue- and lightness-learners as well as untrained controls performed delayed same-different discrimination for lightness and hue pairs. In addition to discrimination data, errors during learning and category-labelling strategies were examined. Errors during learning distributed non-uniformly and in accordance with the Bezold-Brücke effect, which accounts for darker colours at the green-blue boundary appearing greener and lighter colours appearing bluer. Only hue-learners showed discrimination improvements due to category boundary acquisition. Thus, acquisition is more efficient for hue-category compared to lightness-category boundaries. Almost all learners reported using category-labelling strategies, with hue-learners almost exclusively using 'green'/'blue' and lightness learners using a wider range of labels, most often 'light'/'dark'. Thus, labels play an important role in colour category learning and such labelling does not conform to everyday naming: here, the label 'blue' is used for exemplars that would normally be named 'green'. In conclusion, labelling serves the purpose of highlighting key information that differentiates exemplars across the category boundary, and basic colour terms may be particularly effective in facilitating such attentional guidance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the occurrence of the colour term ‘red’ is studied comparatively in the regilaul of two Estonian counties. Earlier studies on colour terms in the Estonian regilaul have shown that colour terms are rarely found in songs. At the same time, they are conspicuous in set phrases, forming formulae, fixed lexical combinations characteristic of the regilaul tradition. The analysis of the songs studied in this article is based on the formulaic concept (i.e. the premise that colour terms are found in set lexical phrases). In interpreting colour term-containing motifs and related topics, this article draws on context-centred folklore research (i.e. the premise that the meaning of neither the formulae nor the colour terms is autonomous, independent of their context of use). A formula containing a colour term does not carry an unambiguous meaning. It is not possible to say, for example, what evaluation the modifier ‘red’ involves in such compounds as ‘pale punane’ (red countenance), ‘punane põõsas’ (red bush), ‘proua punane’ (red lady). However, it reveals that on the motif level these formulae carry a certain meaning: in the praise of the bride or the groom in wedding songs, the ’pale punane’ (red countenance) refers to health and youth, while in the ’indifferent maiden’ motif it refers to the angry disposition of the maiden. Partly, the meanings of ‘red’ become evident thanks to its parallel words (ilus / punane – handsome / red), while on the motif level it appears when the word is used to praise or warn against a character (ilus mees on ihusööja – punane aga verejooja (the handsome husband is a flesh-eater, the red one a blood-drinker): such a young man is not recommended to the girl, as working in the man’s house would ruin her health). It is characteristic that ‘red’ tends to be related with the topic of courting and wedding. When the parallel word of ‘red’ is ‘blue’ (e.g. Minu hella emakene, / siruta see sinine lõnga, / poeta punane paela, / tõmba minu taevasse (Dear mother, / stretch out the blue yarn, / drop down the red ribbon, / pull me up to the heaven)), it remarkably often describes a border situation, either in the social (wedding, death) or natural environment (morning, evening). In summary, it can be said that lexical phrases or formulae that contain colour terms can vary widely. However, the thematic context of using formulae that contain colour terms is considerably stable.

Both the list task (elicitation task or listing task) and the naming task are widely used in psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics and anthropological linguistics as well as in social sciences and clinical testing for Alzheimer's Syndrome. Both methods are easily adaptable to linguistic and other phenomena, applicable without complicated research settings and effortless for researchers to use on research site. Due to the ease they can be used on large numbers of participants who agree to contribute their knowledge voluntarily. Empirical methods can give different results than introspection or corpus analysis. However, both list task and naming tasks have advantages and disadvantages which are not immediately obvious. One of the advantages is that list and naming tasks can be approached by bottom-up analysis. There are disadvantages as well. Listing cannot be performed if a language lacks an umbrella term for a particular semantic field, e.g. smell, where 'smell' itself belongs to the basic-word inventory of the smell domain. In these instances, researchers need to be creative or alternatively abandon the list task altogether, as is known from the literature for languages which do not possess a word for 'colour'. Conversely, with naming tasks, researchers need to be careful when selecting appropriate stimuli which might be especially challenging for large-scale typological studies where concepts might differ from language to language. This article contains multiple examples from Estonian and other languages which refer, on the one hand, to language-specific untranslatable phenomena, and on the other hand, bring out those cases where participants have misunderstood instructions or misinterpreted the stimuli due to their complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article focuses on the peculiarities of the usage of colour terminology in advertisements. We live in a colourful world and there are great many colour words to describe it. We also live in a world where advertisement has become an accompanying phenomenon of our everyday life. It is obvious that the language of advertising has its specific features and it seems worth trying to reveal the role and the meaning of the colours used in advertisements. Colour terms are known to be linguistic universals which have certain associations attached to each of them. We may suppose that the colours that are mostly used in the advertisements are the basic colour terms. The spheres where we expect to find wider usage of colour terms should be the ones connected with fashion industry.

This paper considers the changing referent of the colour terms maroon and magenta. Maroon was a specialised technical term in the mid-eighteen-hundreds within the field of artists’ colours, and the term magenta was introduced in 1860 in the newly-invented chemical dye industry. Both terms spread out into general usage, and in the case of maroon, caused earlier meanings to be disturbed and displaced so that today they are either forgotten or shifted into register-specific usage (namely, North American bureaucratic English and other Extraterritorial English bureaucratic varieties). It is speculated that the English artists’ colours firm of Winsor and Newton had a role in retarding the American sense-development of the colour term maroon, as this firm had a near-monopoly in late nineteenth-century America. Thus, the paper offers a description of semantic change from specialised usage to general usage, with a restriction of specialised usage remaining in a specific functional context. Data is taken from artists’ handbooks, tint-cards and paint catalogues; from police report forms, wanted persons notices, and other official bureaucratic forms; and mention is also made of the novels and letters of Charles Dickens.

Copyright of Maetagused is the property of Estonian Literary Museum, Department of Folkloristics and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Armenian karmir “red” has often been considered as deriving from East Iranian, thus speaking in favour of relations between Armenian and Sogdian, a Middle Iranian language spoken at considerable distance from Armenia. For the origin of Hebrew karmīl, on the other hand, a Middle Persian “karmīr” has been suggested. In either case, the etymology would be Proto-Indo-European *ku̯ṛ́mi- “worm” (be it directly or as a borrowing from Sanskrit kṛ́mi-) from which the colour term would be derived in a way parallel to French vermeil “scarlet” from ver “worm”, thus a term referring to a red dye obtained from scale insects (cochineals). I argue that karmīr is not a Middle Persian word for “red”, that Sogdian is unlikely to be the source of the Armenian and Hebrew words, and that an Indian origin is not probable either because of the specific features of the Indian scale insect dye. Conversely, Armenian scarlet was widely known and appreciated already in antiquity, so that, for historical as well as linguistic reasons, the origin of the word is likely to be an Iranian language within the region where Armenian was spoken. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

"Points-of-View" analysis has been promoted as an appropriate analysis for similarity data collected with the Method of Sorting. It can be regarded as an extension of Cultural Consensus Analysis (CCA). The latter assumes that subjects all base their responses on a single shared 'model' of the items to be sorted (while varying in the level of reliability with which they consult that model). Conversely, the titular "points-of-view" are multiple models, sampled singularly by some subjects' responses, while other subjects combine the models in various proportions. The analysis appears to be comparatively insensitive to the artefacts to which sorting data are prone, which affect how easily they can be interpreted with (for instance) multidimensional scaling (MDS). Here we apply the Points-of-View approach to two sets of data from the colour domain, a sensory modality well-suited for the sorting procedure. One study extracted three viewpoints - i.e., factors, prototypal ways of organising the stimuli - with one viewpoint specific to colour-vision-deficient observers, capturing independently-measured differences among the subjects. In the second study, two viewpoints proved to be appropriate: one arranged the items by two dimensions, lightness/saturation as well as hue, while the second was essentially a one-dimensional hue-based arrangement. This distinction could not be recovered from the raw data by applying MDS with the weighted-Euclidean model of individual difference. We discuss some demographic factors which might dispose subjects to attend to hue only or saturation/lightness as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper reports on a comparative corpus-based semantic analysis of one colour term as it is used in two languages: English yellow and Polish żółty. The investigation of central and peripheral meanings, based on analyses of corpus concordances draws upon the methodology and constructs of cognitive linguistics, such as prototype-based categories, domains, conceptual metonymy and metaphor. The first objective of this parallel study is to determine the prototypical reference points for yellow and żółty, followed by descriptions of those motivations and mechanisms of meaning extensions which lead to 'figurative' usages. The results are tentatively suggested in the form of a general network of related meanings, the entrenchments of which are established on the basis of frequencies attested in samples of 1,500 citations. The outcomes confirm a conceptual proximity reflected in the semantics of these colour terms, which seems to be - perhaps surprisingly - incongruous with the popular association of yellow/żółty with the sun. As the evidence provided by the British National Corpus and the Polish Scientific Publishers' corpus (PWN) reveals, the central and peripheral readings are inspired by the imagery of autumnal and physiological changes, while the semantics of both yellow and żółty reflect the significant influence of cultural factors, unparalleled in the polysemies of the other five basic colour terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The present research is centred around one of the most interesting aspects of text analysis - the colour. The novels chosen for the analysis - "Conclusive Evidence" by Valdimir Nabokov and its self-translation "Drugie berega" - present a great interest from this perspective since they abound in colour. Moreover, the colourful picture created in these two novels seems to be of major importance for the author since Nabokov's palette is extremely elaborate; thus, by studying colour we aim to penetrate into the author's purport. The aim of this article is to present the results of the numeric analysis of colour occurrences in the texts of the two novels under discussion. Such kind of analysis seems to be significant for our purposes since it can give us a most clear idea of some basic features of both texts, as well as some essential discrepancies between them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The Polish set of terms for blue includes, inter alia, the following adjectives: niebieski ‘blue’, błękitny ‘(sky) blue’, granatowy ‘navy blue’, lazurowy ‘azure’, modry ‘(intense) blue’ and siny ‘(grey) violet-blue’. The adjective niebieski is the basic term; however, it shares some of its functions with błękitny, which is frequently used to refer to blue with positive connotations (e.g. błękitna krew ‘blue blood’), whereas negative attitudes are expressed by siny (e.g. siny z zimna ‘blue with cold’, Sinobrody ‘Bluebeard’). The most intriguing relationships are those between niebieski and błękitny because the terms share the prototypical reference, i.e. the sky. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how Vantage Theory (VT) may be useful in explaining these relationships. A proposal is made to include positive connotations in the vantage model of błękitny. The paper also investigates whether the VT findings corroborate other findings such as the results of a questionnaire whose aim was to examine the understanding of the terms for different shades of blue. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Copyright of Eesti Rakenduslingvistika Ühingu Aastaraamat is the property of Eesti Rakenduslingvistika Uhing (ERU) / Estonian Association for Applied Linguistics and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Eesti Rakenduslingvistika Ühingu Aastaraamat is the property of Eesti Rakenduslingvistika Uhing (ERU) / Estonian Association for Applied Linguistics and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Colour terms in Spanish are a heterogeneous and large set in origin and morphology: there are basic colour terms, which can function as adjectives or nouns (verde, blanco, azul, rojo…) and secondary colour terms with a binary structure N1(+basic colour)-N2(object/proper name) (verde esmeralda, blanco hueso, azul cielo, rojo Corintio…), as well as referential terms, which refer primarily to a physical object in which colour is a prominent feature (naranja, granate, lila, carmín…). Finally, there is a set of colour terms which can only function as adjectives by means of adjectival suffixation (verdoso, blancuzco, azulino, rojizo…). Such diversity brings about variable behaviour in identification tests (such as Este color es el + N – This colour is + N) as well as in grammatical tests (derivation, quantification, etc.). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper investigates the connotations of English colour terms with particular attention to figurative uses of black, white, grey, brown, yellow, red, green, blue and a few miscellaneous colours. The connotations are judged on the basis of whether the phrases in which the colour terms occur are typically orthophemistic, euphemistic, or dysphemistic. All the colours surveyed have some, often many, orthophemistic connotations; euphemistic connotations of colours are rare; but dysphemism is common. Black is used orthophemistically but not euphemistically; it more often has dysphemistic connotations than other colours. It is often connected to darkness (the night), death, decay, and evil deeds. Black has often been used dysphemistically of human skin colour, though it can be orthophemistic. White is in contrast to black and, as such, linked to light and purity; it mostly has positive connotations. Dysphemistic uses depict cowardice and fear; white is rarely used in euphemism. Located on the achromatic scale between black and white, grey is, of course, used for indeterminability and dullness. It gives rise to few figures. The faecal associations of brown lead to several dysphemisms; it is found in no euphemisms and few orthophemisms in figurative speech. In figurative expressions, yellow is dysphemistically used of cowards and cheap paper, and sometimes of Asiatic people. Most figurative expressions, both positive and negative, link red with blood—life-blood, the blood of the slain, or menstrual blood. The colour green is linked to living vegetation; negative connotations arise when it is the colour of illness or jealousy. The negative aspects of figurative uses of blue arise from fear, fighting, despondency, and tabooed language and behaviour. It is arguable that the use of blue to speak about these topics is euphemistic and that uses of blue are rarely dysphemistic. Colour terms such as gold, silver, and platinum derive from the names for valuable metals from which they derive their mostly positive connotations. All figurative uses of colour terms surveyed are, perhaps predictably, based upon the visual attributes of the denotatum. Although individuals may experience synesthesia when encountering colour terms, the language resources demonstrate none. My classification of the connotations of English colour terms reveals networks of associations, but no surprises. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Aspects of the semantics of colour terms in English-lexifier Atlantic creoles have been observed by creolists, and have generally been attributed to West African substrate influence. This paper explores, through lexicographic evidence, the basic colour term inventories displayed by English-lexifier Caribbean varieties, and one West African variety, from the perspective of research on the universals of colour terms initiated by Berlin and Kay. It is argued that West African substrate influence (revisited from the perspective of cross-linguistic research on colour terms) and considerations from a universalist perspective best account for the colour term systems displayed by English-lexifier Atlantic creoles, although possible superstrate influence is also briefly explored. Insights from the research on universals of colour terms, such as colour term hierarchies and trajectories, the salience of certain categories, and the relationship between technological complexity and colour term inventories, prove useful in a discussion of colour terms that is framed within an account of creole development that admits multiple contributing factors. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]