Terms Of Color Research Articles

BERT-assisted behavioral profiling of polysemy: contrastive analysis of HONG in Chinese and RED in English

Abstract This study conducts a corpus-based contrastive analysis of the basic color term “red” in Chinese (HONG) and English (RED), innovatively employing the AI model BERT to triangulate, validate, and enrich the findings of the behavioral profile (BP) analysis. Results illustrate HONG’s more variational semasiological structure than RED, with both exhibiting unique usage patterns among similarities. The triangulation with BERT embeddings visualizes the performance of each subjectively annotated BP variable, and further demonstrates the semantic extending process in both HONG and RED. The underlying cognitive and socio-cultural factors are lastly discussed. Theoretically, this study bridges frequency-based AI models and usage-based Cognitive Linguistics by simulating human cognitive processes to abstract linguistic knowledge from extensive data, advancing our understanding of language through AI technology. Methodologically, this study is the first to integrate AI models in assisting BP analysis, with BERT embeddings offering objective corroborations and deeper insights for conclusions drawn from subjectively labeled BP data.

Five Basic Colour Terms and Colour Taboos in Ancient China (Part One)

This paper aims to explore the use of five basic colour terms and colour taboos in ancient China. Looking at many literary texts, including Classic of Poetry, Collection of Oracle Bone Inscriptions, Discussing Writings and Explaining Characters, and several other collections, the paper offers a detailed analysis of the etymology and meanings of the following Chinese colour terms: huang 黄 ‘yellow’, chi 赤 ‘red’, bai 白 ‘white’, hei 黑 ‘black’ and qing 青 ‘cyan’. Colours have always carried well-defined symbolic meanings in China, for instance, red is associated with wealth, dignity and happiness. Besides, the five basic colours are linked to elements and cardinal points: yellow – Earth and Centre, red – Fire and South, white – Metal and West, black – Water and North, cyan – Wood and East. The investigated ancient Chinese texts provide evidence that colours implied high and low social ranks, good and bad personal qualities or fortune. The use of some colours in specific circumstances, as well as by people with a certain status, was prohibited. The cultural and social taboo phenomenon was connected with expressing self-identity and manifested itself in clothes and folk customs as well as in numerous other ways.

ZTF SN Ia DR2: Study of Type Ia supernova light-curve fits

Type Ia supernova (SN Ia) cosmology relies on the estimation of light-curve parameters to derive precision distances, which are used to infer cosmological parameters such as $H_0$, $ and $w$. The empirical SALT2 light-curve modeling that relies on only two parameters, a stretch $x_1$ and a color $c$, has been used by the community for almost two decades. We study the ability of the SALT2 model to fit the nearly 3000 cosmology-grade SN Ia light curves from the second release of the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) cosmology science working group. While the ZTF data were not used to train SALT2, the algorithm models the ZTF SN Ia optical light curves remarkably well, except for light-curve points prior to $-10$ d from maximum, where the training critically lacks data. We find that the light-curve fitting is robust against the considered choice of phase range, but we show that the $ $ d range is optimal in terms of statistics and accuracy. We do not detect any significant features in the light-curve fit residuals that could be connected to the host environment. Potential systematic uncertainties associated tp population differences related to the SN Ia host properties might thus not be accountable for by the inclusion of addition of light-curve parameters. However, a small but significant inconsistency between residuals of blue and red SN Ia strongly suggests the existence of a phase-dependent color term, with potential implications for the use of SNe Ia in precision cosmology. We thus encourage further work in this area to explore this possibility, and we emphasize that SN Ia cosmology must include a SALT2 retraining to accurately model the light curves and avoid biasing the derivation of cosmological parameters.

The colonisation of the colour pink: variation and change in Māori’s colour lexicon

Abstract All languages exhibit basic colour terms that manifest how distinct linguistic systems categorise colour. Māori, the language of the indigenous people of New Zealand, demonstrates an instructive case where drastic innovations in colour terminology took place in response to environmental and cultural influences. We demonstrate how and when Māori accrued new colour terms to replace existing ones in its immediate ancestor, Proto-Eastern-Polynesian, and eventually coined new colour terms through borrowing from native words for nature to match the English colour categories that did not previously exist in Māori – except for the colour pink. While contemporary Māori is at the same stage as English (Stage VII) in Berlin and Kay’s colour term hierarchy, the evidence is that Māori was at Stage IV pre-colonisation, possessing only five native colour categories. The evolution of Māori’s colour categories thus illuminates how colonisation may impact the basic vocabulary of a language, both in the Māori settling a new land in the 13th century and in their subsequent language contact with English colonisers in the 19th century.

Krāsu gamma Aleksandra Grīna romānā „Dvēseļu putenis”

The colour palette utilised in the epic work “Dvēseļu putenis” (Blizzard of Souls) by Aleksandrs Grīns, which tells the story of Latvian riflemen’s battles of World War I in both a partly documentary and fictional manner, aids in visualising the horror of war and the fragility of peace, simultaneously evoking emotional experiences. This study aims to explore the colouristic imagery of war and peace in this novel, examining colour adjectives and other colour designations in a derivatively semantic and functional aspect. Through content analysis of the text and a derivational semantic analysis of the selected language material, it became apparent that the novel utilises the names and nuances of primary colours and prefixal and suffixal derivatives, compounds, compound derivatives, and analytical lexemes. The spectrum of colour adjectives formed is somewhat limited and uniform, often repeating the same means of expression. Indirect nomination methods are actively used, particularly vividly manifesting in the description of the war environment, battles, and experiences. Colour names are primarily used in semantic fields as follows: • human – for depicting their emotional and visual portrait in the context of war and peace, • nature during peace, the anticipation of war, and during the war itself, • battlefield, battle. Colour names are hardly used in descriptions of battles; instead, associative stimuli dominate, such as fire, flames, darkness, burning, blazing, etc. The spectral image of a person, environment, and its objects is formed using the following: • adjectives of primary or secondary colours, such as white, off-white, grey, red, green, bluish-black, • associative semantic correlations created by the characteristics of secondary adjectives of the motivator, for example, blood-red, sky-blue, rosy, leaden, steel-blue, • colour adjective-motivated nouns, verbs, or adverbs – greenery, redness, to turn pale, reddening, bluish gleaming, • the spectral stimuli that create an associative link with the colour of the named object, for example, the edge of the sky glowing in the fire of sunset; the golden shimmer of evening sun rays, etc. By combining visual paintings, where both the directly named and indirectly revealed spectral tones resonate strongly, with auditory scenes, the reader is deliberately immersed in an environment of fear, horror, bloody events, and hatred. By intensifying the means of expression, fears are heightened, vibrations of impending disasters are stirred, and the image of anger and hatred is magnified. Peacetime scenes are dedicated little space, dominated by the green colour of life and light tones.

Semantic variation and semantic change in the color lexicon

Abstract Color terms show a remarkable variation in their possible lexicalization patterns across different languages. In the literature, the interest has been especially to describe the color lexicon of a certain language and to determine whether it may abide or not by Berlin and Kay’s universal evolutionary sequence, e.g., whether a certain color denomination may be considered as a basic color term, or whether a certain color category is lexicalized by more than one basic color term, by which criteria, etc. It has not been established, however, which are the most common lexical sources of basic color terms on a comparative basis, and which semantic changes are more common in this semantic field. On the basis of data drawn from 70 ancient and modern Indo-European languages, we aim at answering precisely these research questions concerning the origin and the development of basic color terms. We discuss the various lexical sources of the basic color terms for white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, gray, orange, pink, and purple, and we show the most important semantic changes leading to these color meanings. We also discuss to which extent these terms are likely to be inherited or borrowed. All this aims at being a contribution to the study of diachronic semantics.

SEMANTICS AND MEANING OF TERMS WITH THE COMPONENT ’RED’

The article provides an analysis of the results of a study on the semantics and meanings of terms with the component red in modern Bulgarian. The language material on which basis the study was carried out is an electronic corpus of Bulgarian language texts compiled from publicly available internet sources. Statistical approaches to search for concordances and collocations available through the Sketch Engine lexicographic software were used to discover the terms in the corpus, and the order in the search procedures (algorithm) was previously tested in other cited studies. The theoretical approach of the study involves tracing the semantics and meanings of terms for the color red and terms with the component red using both traditional approaches such as the theory of nomination (by detection of the main semantic component), and modern theories, such as the theory of prototypes (by evaluation of color’s prototypes) in the analysis of the semantics of these terms. Results and examples of high-frequency contextual corpus usages of red are provided to analyze the terms’ semantics and meanings both as a color term and terms with other (non-color) meanings (prototypes and terms of the basic features of the prototypes), and related conclusions on semantics and meanings of these terms are provided. The color component of the terms at issue is interpreted in the context of a broader understanding of color (such as macro-color), in its transition to other colors, and it is also noted that those terms relate to similar terms with a color component, for example white, establishing a semantic relation through the macro-color component.

Color–emotion associations by speakers of Spanish and Mandarin in verbal and visual tasks: a comparison

Abstract This study aims to determine if there are differences in color–emotion association between monolingual speakers of Spanish and Mandarin, depending on how colors are presented (verbally or visually). We tested two groups of 25 speakers of these two languages in two different tasks using the Geneva Emotion Wheel, which encompasses 20 types of emotions. In Task 1, 13 colors were presented to participants as color terms in their native language, whereas in Task 2 the same colors were presented as color patches from the Munsell chart. Participants were then asked to associate color terms or color patches to the set of emotion concepts (and intensities of emotion) in the Geneva Emotion Wheel. Overall, differences between languages were not significant, regarding either the type of emotion or individual dimensions of emotion (valence, arousal or power), although significant differences were observed for specific colors. Also, Spanish speakers tended to attribute higher intensity values and higher numbers of emotion values to colors. At the same time, speakers of both languages reacted similarly to color presentation, with color terms being associated with the same emotions as color patches, but eliciting stronger reactions with respect to intensity and the number of emotion values. Finally, we found less variability in color–emotion associations within the Spanish-speaking group. Overall, our study points to a mixed pattern of universality and culture-specificity regarding how colors are used for conveying emotions by people.

Perceptual, Semantic, and Pragmatic Factors Affect the Derivation of Contrastive Inferences.

People derive contrastive inferences when interpreting adjectives (e.g., inferring that 'the short pencil' is being contrasted with a longer one). However, classic eye-tracking studies revealed contrastive inferences with scalar and material adjectives, but not with color adjectives. This was explained as a difference in listeners' informativity expectations, since color adjectives are often used descriptively (hence not warranting a contrastive interpretation). Here we hypothesized that, beyond these pragmatic factors, perceptual factors (i.e., the relative perceptibility of color, material and scalar contrast) and semantic factors (i.e., the difference between gradable and non-gradable properties) also affect the real-time derivation of contrastive inferences. We tested these predictions in three languages with prenominal modification (English, Hindi, and Hungarian) and found that people derive contrastive inferences for color and scalar adjectives, but not for material adjectives. In addition, the processing of scalar adjectives was more context dependent than that of color and material adjectives, confirming that pragmatic, perceptual and semantic factors affect the derivation of contrastive inferences.

Voice of Empowerment: Debunking Gendered Language in Emma Watson’s Advocacy

For nearly five decades, Robin Lakoff’s women’s language features have been well examined. These features such as hedges, intensifiers, and rising intonation have traditionally positioned women as powerless language users due to their less-assertive nature. However, few have highlighted how these features can serve as rhetorical strategies that can effectively utilized to argue confidently without appearing overly assertive, in line with social expectations. This study examines women’s language features used by Emma Watson at the HeForShe Campaign 2014. By using a descriptive qualitative method, we collected data from Emma’s speech to identify the features of the women’s language that she used to address gender equality issues. The study found six of Lakoff’s (1975) women’s language features, with lexical hedges being the most frequently used to represent politeness and caution in speaking as well as expressing respect for the interlocutor. Notably, tag questions, precise color terms, hypercorrect grammar, and avoiding strong swear words were not found, likely due to their irrelevance to the feminism-focused topic in the campaign. Instead of highlighting the perceived weaknesses of women’s language, this study emphasizes that women’s language can be a means to empower women’s voices. Emma effectively and persuasively delivered her campaign by using her mastery of language, storytelling techniques, and rhetoric to engage the audience. Overall, Emma strategically utilized women’s language to demonstrate her linguistic capability and even persuade the audience effectively rather than showing the weakness of women’s language as commonly perceived by previous studies.

Exploring the categorical nature of colour perception: Insights from artificial networks

The electromagnetic spectrum of light from a rainbow is a continuous signal, yet we perceive it vividly in several distinct colour categories. The origins and underlying mechanisms of this phenomenon remain partly unexplained. We investigate categorical colour perception in artificial neural networks (ANNs) using the odd-one-out paradigm. In the first experiment, we compared unimodal vision networks (e.g., ImageNet object recognition) to multimodal vision-language models (e.g., CLIP text-image matching). Our results show that vision networks predict a significant portion of human data (approximately 80%), while vision-language models account for the remaining unexplained data, even in non-linguistic experiments. These findings suggest that categorical colour perception is a language-independent representation, though it is partly shaped by linguistic colour terms during its development. In the second experiment, we explored how the visual task influences the colour categories of an ANN by examining twenty-four Taskonomy networks. Our results indicate that human-like colour categories are task-dependent, predominantly emerging in semantic and 3D tasks, with a notable absence in low-level tasks. To explain this difference, we analysed kernel responses before the winner-takes-all stage, observing that networks with mismatching colour categories may still align in underlying continuous representations. Our findings quantify the dual influence of visual signals and linguistic factors in categorical colour perception and demonstrate the task-dependent nature of this phenomenon, suggesting that categorical colour perception emerges to facilitate certain visual tasks.

ANALYSING WOMEN'S LANGUAGE FEATURES IN ESHA CHHABRA'S TED TALK ON ENVIRONMENTAL BUSINESS

This research, titled "Women's Language Features of Environmental Business Journalist Esha Chhabra Video on TED YouTube Channel," aims to identify the characteristics of women's language used by Esha Chhabra. The data was collected from her spoken words in the video. The study identified 41 instances of women's language features, including lexical hedges, tag questions, rising intonation, empty adjectives, intensifiers, hypercorrect grammar, super polite forms, and emphatic stress. The most frequently used feature was the intensifier, which the speaker employed to reinforce her statements and persuade the audience. While the least encountered features are tag question, hypercorrect grammar, and emphatic stress. Notably, two features—precise color terms and strong swears words—was absent. This absence is attributed to the video's business context, where strong swear words are inappropriate, and precise color terms are unnecessary. This research contributes to understanding how women's language features are utilized in professional and public speaking contexts.

From color naming to color perception: Cross‐linguistic differences of the chromatic information processing in monolingual and bilingual speakers

AbstractThere has been long running debate about the interaction of language and perception. In this context, bilingual people have often shown benefits, due to their double‐active linguistic system, in cognitive functions, like inhibition, attention, and memory, which are central for visual perception. Color naming and categorization are domains for studying cross‐linguistic effects, which arise from conceptual and perceptual variations across speakers of different languages. In this study, we compared the ‘blue’ lexicon of highly proficient French‐Italian bilinguals to monolingual speakers of the corresponding languages. Prior studies have shown that Italian has two basic color terms for the blue area of color space: one denotes light blue hues (azzurro) and the other dark blue hues (blu), whilst French, with only one basic term bleu, lacks this distinction. We used a Stroop test to probe differences in perception and categorization of blue in bi‐ and monolingual speakers. We found that Italian monolinguals name the ink color more accurately and more rapidly when the word blu is rendered in dark blue ink (corresponding to the word blu) than when it is printed in light blue ink (corresponding to azzurro), since the latter represents an incongruent condition for them. This ‘category effect’ does not exist for French monolingual speakers. Our bilinguals' results demonstrate that, despite the emergence of a specific in‐between perceptual behavior, bilinguals generally performed like Italian monolinguals. These outcomes confirm the hypothesis that their second language categories (Italian) dominate their native language (French), attesting that lexical distinctions influence perceptual faculties in general. However, the ratio of the interference effect (longer reaction times for incongruent stimuli compared to control stimuli) and the facilitation effect (shorter reaction times for congruent stimuli compared to control stimuli) is not the same for bilinguals and monolinguals. The highest magnitude in the facilitation effect was revealed for bilinguals, whereas the highest magnitude in the interference effect was revealed for Italian monolingual speakers. This phenomenon adds evidence to the existence of enhanced bilingual cognitive control abilities.

The Morphological Study of Colour Terms in Nigerian English

The paper investigates the nature of morphological processes of colour terms among the users of English in Nigeria and their syntactic usages using a multi-dimensional approach in data gathering. The data was drawn from one hundred subjects across ten ethnic groups, including Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba as well as fifteen textual materials written in English by Nigerian scholars. The paper adopts a cognitive linguistic multidimensional framework. The paper reveals that the colour systems and usages among Nigerians contrast with the system within the native speakers of the language. For instance "fresh leave green", "pale blue", "blood red", "yolk yellow", "black black", "dark so and so", "charcoal", "flesh", , "dirty green", "dudu" and so on are formed through several morphological processes such as coining, clipping, blending, borrowing, compounding, reduplication and affixation as well as usage in various syntactic operations as in nominals and adjectives: "The shirt is dark so and so." and "The yellows ran out of the scorching sun." which serves as adjective and nominal plural respectively. Hence the paper concludes that morphology and syntax of most colours in Nigerian context have been influenced by many indigenous languages in the country. Hence, the hierarchy of the basic colours violates the Berlin and Kay"s evolutionary sequence and Kay and Maffi"s Trajectory model of Colour terms within the circle of the native speakers of English.

The experimental study of the image of russian color term white in the consciousness of russian culture bearers

The experimental study of the image of russian color term white in the consciousness of russian culture bearers

A study in scarlet: cultural memory of the tropes related to the color red, female countenance, and onstage makeup in the Sinophone world

Abstract In a high-context culture like Chinese, the linguistic code encompasses only part of the message and is incomplete without context. One of the implicit codes embedded in high-context communication is color tropes. Highly recognizable in the Sinophone world, color tropes often manifest themselves in the forms of metaphor, metonymy, allusions, and similes and are often related to the conveyance of emotional content. This paper provides a selection and discussion of such color tropes, demonstrates that color in a language inspires associations and connotations that are often very subtle and determined by deep cultural memory, and, giving several Chinese examples, shows how the primary semasiology of a color term often influences its subsequent semantic extension.

Связь между словами-цветообозначениями и эмотивной лексикой: сопоставительный аспект

The purpose of the article is to fix the connection between color terms and emotive vocabulary, to describe the results of the directed association experiment. In the article, we demanded the respondents to write down color terms related to the emotions (sadness, pleasure, anger, anxiety, aggression, love, calmness, fear, optimism, envy, relaxation, happiness, astonishment, delight, pity, embarrassment). The comparison of the results obtained made it possible to determine the correlation between emotions and color in the linguistic consciousness of speakers of Russian and Chinese linguistic cultures. The experiment involved 100 people of each linguistic culture (aged 18-40). The results showed similarities and differences between colors and emotions.

Colour terms and intensifying constructions in Italian

This investigation proposes a corpus-based description of Italian intensifying constructions including colour terms. Colour terms may be employed as intensification markers in intensifying colour constructions, i.e., ready-made syntactic patterns containing colour terms that have an intensifying function. The paper aims at identifying and classifying different patterns of Italian intensifying colour constructions using syntactic/semantic parameters. These constructions can convey different types and degrees of intensified meanings and can be arranged along an intensification cline. Taking into account data gathered from the ITTenTen16 corpus, the analysis identifies the abstract semantic schemata underlying intensifying colour constructions (e.g., the metonymic/metaphoric scale association), and explores the relation between colour terms and schemata, in terms of degrees of lexicalisation/constructionalisation and pattern productivity.

COLOUR TERMS IN ASTROPHYSICAL TEXTS: A CORPUS STUDY

The aim of this paper is to present colour terms used by scientists in the field of astrophysics. We take into consideration both basic and non-basic colour terms – as understood by Berlin and Kay (1969). The research material, compiled in a corpus with AntConc, consists of abstracts published in selected astrophysical journals. The corpus size is 2,319,787 words. The most frequent basic colour term found in the abstracts is black (612 occurrences), followed by white (167), red (160), blue (111) and green (98). It appears that the frequent word combinations in which these and other colour words are used happen to be specialized terms whose formation involved metaphorical or metonymic processes, e.g. red giant, white dwarf, red planet, red noise and blue straggler.

Color categorization as a cultural schema

The relevance and novelty of this study is determined by its purpose, which is to analyze color categorization as a cultural schema. Color categorization is understood as a way of dividing the color continuum into discrete areas (color categories), which society then endows with cultural connotations and includes in the general system of cultural knowledge. According the mentioned purpose, the concept of “cultural schema” was considered, the structure of color categorization as a cultural schema was designated and an analysis of its consistent inheritance and genesis in culture was presented. To reveal the main stages of the color categorization genesis and its typological characteristics, the ternary model of culture by A. V. Kostina and A. Ya. Flier was used. Based on the identified specificity of the interaction of three functional types of culture (consumer, traditional and creative), two types of color categorization are distinguished: natural and artificial. Natural color categorization is the historically first way of classifying color, which develops as nature is imitated (natural classes of colors) and dyes available to people are mastered. An important result of the accumulation and production of new knowledge in the field of color is the formation of a taxonomy of color terms in natural language, as well as the establishment of color categorization in everyday human consciousness in the form of cultural norms and customs, for example, the division of colors into “male” and “female” or into “festive” and “everyday” in religious clothing. As cultural practices associated with color develop, artificial color categorization arises against the background of natural color categorization. Its main distinguishing feature is a completely controlled process of obtaining color and codification of color relations in the form of atlases and color systems.