Abstract
The article explores lexical units denoting colour in English. The study focuses on colour lexemes in a literary text in terms of their combining potential, structure, and stylistic properties. The undertaken analysis of 11 basic colour lexemes (black, white, grey, red, blue, orange, yellow, green, purple, pink, brown) testifies to their combinability with twelve thematic word-groups that denote: appearance, footgear, dress, headgear, fauna, flora, parts of the body, natural phenomena, objects, magic, substances, food. Sixteen non-basic colour lexemes (sallow, auburn, blank, swarthy, silver, livid, scarlet, gold / golden, blond, amber, emerald, aquamarine, violet, lilac, turquoise, crimson) demonstrate combinability with only five thematic word-groups: appearance, objects, magic, dress, substances. The prevailing usage of the basic colour lexeme black and non-basic colour lexeme gold / golden is explained by the general magical atmosphere created by J. K. Rowling in the novels featuring adventures of the young sorcerer Harry Potter. The analysis of word-building specificity of colour lexemes proves that compounding of the pattern Adj+Adj ( white-blond; golden-brown; light-blue ) is the predominant way of their formation. Stylistic devices involving colour lexemes in the analysed literary texts are used with the aim to enhance the expressiveness of the narrative pieces, provide additional characteristics to the people and objects described, produce a humorous effect, and arrange the rhythmical pattern of the utterances. Rowling’s choice of certain colour lexemes is illustrative of her individual author’s style.
Highlights
The study of lexical units denoting colour has recently been in the limelight of linguistic research
Prior to our analysis of colour lexemes functioning in a literary text we resorted to Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English (Hornby, 1994), out of which we singled out 11 lexemes that denote basic colour terms and 95 lexemes that denote the hues of basic colour terms, as well as saturation and lightness/brightness
We have discovered that all basic colour lexemes are used in text fragments describing appearance of the characters
Summary
The study of lexical units denoting colour has recently been in the limelight of linguistic research. The authors argue against the theory of relativity advanced by Sapir (1921) and Whorf (1956) and formulated by Bloomfield (1933). They advance the idea that unlike physicists, who view the colour-spectrum as a continuous scale of light-waves of different lengths, ranging from 40 to 72 hundred-thousandths of a millimetre, languages mark off different parts of this scale quite arbitrarily and without precise limits, in the meanings of such colour-names as violet, blue, green, yellow, orange, red, and the colour-names of different languages do not embrace the same gradations According to Wierzbicka (2008), if a language has no word for “colour”, it cannot have “a concept of colour” (p. 408), and, colour universals
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