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Language

Human language

Colour

Colour semantic studies of individual languages are often greatly concerned, some would say obsessed, with the matter of basicness. Which colour words are Basic Colour Terms (BCTs) and which are not? As with other basic vocabulary, BCTs are frequently used, in both speech and writing, and they are well known to all adult speakers of the language. English speakers all know words such as mother, arm, red and green but they are less likely to encounter and/or understand sibling, pancreas, burgundy and taupe, which suggests that the second word-set contains non-basic terms.1

[T]he article presents a detailed study of the visual world reflected in the Australian language Warlpiri and in Warlpiri ways of speaking, showing that while Warlpiri people have no ‘colour-talk’ (and no colour-practices’), they have a rich visual discourse of other kinds, linked with their own cultural practices.6

  • Social, cultural, and economic factors influence use of colour terms.
    • A novel's language is influenced by these factors (mentioned elsewhere)
    • Still, colour words hold universal associations.1
  • Bias in Language
    • Charting the spread of colour words using the Historical Thesaurus.3
    • Development of secondary colour terms in English.4

Metaphor

Colour in literature

Devices

Metaphor

  • Relationship between metaphor and perceptual phenomena
    • Wendy Anderson, Ellen Bramwell, and Carole Hough, eds., Mapping English Metaphor Through Time, Oxford Linguistics (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2016).
    • Marc Alexander et al., “Metaphor, Popular Science, and Semantic Tagging: Distant Reading with the Historical Thesaurus of English,” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2015, https://doi.org/10/gf86x7.
Children
  1. Metaphor

Footnotes

  1. Biggam, Carole P. “Prehistoric Colour Semantics: A Contradiction in Terms.” In Colour Studies: A Broad Spectrum, edited by Wendy Anderson, Carole P. Biggam, Carole Hough, and Christian Kay, 3–28. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2014.˄

  2. Wierzbicka, Anna. “Why There Are No ‘Colour Universals’ in Language and Thought.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14, no. 2 (2008): 407–25. https://doi.org/10/d894bn.˄

  3. Marc Alexander and Christian Kay, “The Spread of RED in the Historical Thesaurus of English,” in Colour Studies, ed. Wendy Anderson et al. (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2014), 126–39, https://doi.org/10/dvk3.˄

  4. Casson, Ronald W. “Russett, Rose, and Raspberry: The Development of English Secondary Color Terms.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 4, no. 1 (1994): 5–22. https://doi.org/10/c8tmdh.˄

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