A contrastive study of colour terms in French and German causal constructions

Abstract

This contrastive study explores the conceptualization of colours in different speech communities as they are realized in causal constructions, e.g. Je suis rouge de colère (‘I am red with rage’) or Er ist grün vor Neid (‘He is green with jealousy’). The theoretical framework is based on Goldberg’s model of Construction Grammar (1995, 2006) and on the theory of conceptual metaphor and metonymy. Colour terms in causal constructions are associated with specific emotions, but also with positive or negative values dependent on the speech community. The investigation includes corpus frequency, meaning and use contrasts in French and German, and elicited data, which allows us to highlight the typological and conceptualization differences between both languages.