COLOUR TERMS AS COMPONENTS OF UKRAINIAN AND ENGLISH IDIOMS : AN ATTEMPT AT A CONTRASTIVE LINGUOCULTURAL ANALYSIS

Abstract

The article offers a contrastive analysis of colour terms (CTs) as components of the phraseological units in English and Ukrainian. Among the perceptive variables considered that of colour is one in which we are physically capable of making a considerable numbers of distinctions, so the question how these are grouped into classes in any given language is of great importance. The notion of colour has many aspects, it also contains a fair amount of relevant information accumulated by the language bearer and rooted in the structure of colour concepts by which the language community operates (e.g., the symbolic meaning of colour, evaluative components, colour preferences, etc.). The lexical meaning of a CT – the unit of the language which names a certain domain of the colour spectrum – is the lingual interpretation of man’s knowledge and notions about a natural colour signal. In the contrastive aspect the denotative component of CTs is mainly, convergent, designating the shade, brightness and saturation of colour, however, their connotative components are frequently divergent and often dependent on the specific communicative load of a given CT as a constituent of the utterance. In Ukrainian CTs are adjectives, adverbs (not infrequently used with diminutive suffixes or with prefixes, sometimes in the prolonged forms) and verbs, while in English they are limited only to adjectives. CTs can be given a specific meaning in certain contexts. Whereas the primary coding of CTs must be understood as an act of naming (primary coding is a set of morphemes), a secondary coding is either a wilful act carried out by a person or it is suggested by the conventions of a society or culture. The connotative component includes different associative symbolic shades of meaning and contains some implicit information yielded by the imagined connections of phenomena of various nature on the basis of associations. The background knowledge of the phenomenon of colour is a rich source of occasional sense components of CTs. Keywords: colour terms, phraseological unit, Ukrainian, English, contrastive analysis, denotative meaning, connotative meaning, linguocultural studies.