Abstract
The present article analyses the semantic structure of the colour term (green) in Arabic to establish whether it has undergone a change in terms of meanings and prototypes and to identify the motivating factors for its semantic change. The current study compares and contrasts the polysemy of (green) in premodern texts and modern texts. To explore the meanings of the word and to identify its most frequent collocates and thus most prototypical meanings, the study employs the ArabiCorpus (Arabic Corpus Search Tool). The data collected on the term are analysed in accordance with Rosch’s [1] [2] prototype theory, and Lakoff and Johnson’s [3] conceptual metonymy and conceptual metaphor. The results show that scores highly in its average occurrence in both premodern texts and modern texts and maintains its favourable meaning despite the variance in its prototypical meanings across the selected subcorpora. Its semantic expansion is motivated by conceptual metonymy, conceptual metaphor and loan translation respectively.
Highlights
IntroductionColour stands for the psychological explanation of retinal and neuronal sensation of reflected light, comprising three attributes, namely hue (i.e., sensation of wavelengths), brightness (i.e., sensation of luminance) and saturation (i.e., sensation of purity of a dominant wavelength) [4] [5] [6]
Colour stands for the psychological explanation of retinal and neuronal sensation of reflected light, comprising three attributes, namely hue, brightness and saturation [4] [5] [6]
The present article analyses the semantic structure of the colour term أخضر in Arabic to establish whether it has undergone a change in terms of meanings and prototypes and to identify the motivating factors for its semantic change
Summary
Colour stands for the psychological explanation of retinal and neuronal sensation of reflected light, comprising three attributes, namely hue (i.e., sensation of wavelengths), brightness (i.e., sensation of luminance) and saturation (i.e., sensation of purity of a dominant wavelength) [4] [5] [6]. The lexical units that humans use to express colour concepts may differ. People from different cultural contexts may have the same colour experiences, but they may vocalize these experiences differently [6]. In spite of the fact that languages may vary in the number of terms they use for colour concepts, there exists a universal list of eleven basic colour terms: black, white, red, yellow, green, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, and grey. For another instance, Arabic, like English, comprises eleven colour terms [9]. Humans may see the same colour, but they may interpret it differently based on their bodily, social and cultural experiences. Colour categories spring from the world, human biology, a cognitive mechanism possessing some of the properties of fuzzy set theory, and a culture-specific selection of the basic colour categories [10]
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