Abstract
AbstractThe present study is an extension of our analysis of Russian basic color terms (BCTs) elicited in a web‐based psycholinguistic experiment. Color samples (N = 600) were approximately uniformly distributed in the Munsell color solid. An unconstrained color‐naming method was employed. Native Russian speakers (N = 713; 333 males) participated in the study. Among 1422 elicited unique color words, 698 terms (49%) were derived from object names. Here we explore object‐derived non‐BCTs, focusing on broad classes of names referred to objects, categories within these, and the inventory of color terms, as well as their frequency, patterns of derivation, and derivational productivity. Six classes of object referents were identified: flora, fauna, inanimate nature, food and beverages, man‐made objects, body and bodily products. In detail, 20 most frequent object‐derived terms are reported. These are accompanied by analysis of gender differences and representation of the terms' denotata on the Munsell Mercator projection. In addition, Russian object‐derived color terms are related to those in English; discussed are differences between the 2 languages in the color term classes, inventories and incidences. We conclude that Russian object‐derived color terms follow the generic metonymy pattern, that is, signifying color of objects in the speakers' natural environment. The inventory is also language‐specific, reflecting social practices, preferences and views entrenched in the traditional Russian culture. Furthermore, recent extensive development of the inventory signals 2 novel phenomena: marked globalization influence, surfacing as abundant transliteration of English referent loanwords, and noticeable sociolectal diversification that manifests itself by novel evocative color terms, particularly in marketing and advertisement.
Highlights
All data presented below in graphic and tabular form refer to the corpus of Russian color terms obtained in our large-scale study.[1]
As shown in our previous study,[1] both color terms were the only 2 non-basic color terms (BCTs) in the list of 10 most frequent color terms offered by Russian speakers, along with 8 BCTs
We found that in both languages the number of objects used as color-term referents constitute a significant number: 215 objects (15%) among 1422 Russian unique color words, compared to 251 objects (20%) among 1226 English unique color words (Table 9)
Summary
Description of color by means of naming objects, which possess this color, is a universal feature of existing languages.[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10] Color names develop metonymically, whereby “Entity stand for entity's color”, quoting Casson.[11,12] The phenomenon can be illustrated by English adjectives gold (made of gold) and golden (appearing made of gold) and numerous non-basic color terms such as rose, flesh, peach, maroon[13,14,15,16] or, in German, by reseda “mignonette”, türkis “turquoise”, aubergine “eggplant”.17 In these cases, the perceived color is conveyed based on the relation of similarity. The results are an extension of our previous analysis of the same dataset,[1] which focused primarily on Russian basic color terms (BCTs) and their (denotative) comparison with the English counterparts
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