Color words in literary Russian: Connotations and gender differences in use

Abstract

Abstract Connotations, or the semantic prosodies of words, are associations acquired through exposure to diverse contexts and may be different for the same language item used by different speakers or groups of speakers. In order to compare connotations of the same language item between groups, tools of comparison are of interest. One such tool is analysis of word frequencies in contexts. This article considers a few hypotheses on gender-linked differences in the use of color words in Russian literary texts. Frequencies of total use of color words, and then of color words modifying nouns referring to body parts, color words modifying nouns referring to clothes, color words which have emotional connotations and of color words used to describe elements of landscape are compared for texts authored by women or by men. For the first three subcategories, it was hypothesized that women on average use more color adjectives in this category than men do. For the last category, it was hypothesized that men use more color adjectives in this category than women do. Two studies have been done to verify these hypotheses. Only the last hypothesis, on greater frequency of color words used to describe landscape in men-authored texts, has been confirmed at a statistically significant level. The hypotheses that women use a greater number of total color adjectives on average, and that women use more color adjectives to modify nouns referring to body parts and clothes, were each confirmed at a marginal level of statistical significance. Another avenue for investigating the limits of the concept “connotation” uses syntactic tests. One can say that a number of phrases in Russian are (un)acceptable or highly unusual because there exists a recurring connotation connecting a certain color with a certain state of affairs. However, it is questionable whether connotations limited to a sociolinguistic group can be tested using syntactic tests.