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Article published In:
Diachronica
Vol. 40:4 (2023) ► pp.492–531

Linguistic mechanisms of colour term evolution

A diachronic investigation of “Russian browns” buryj and koričnevyj

ORCID logo | Kazan Federal University
ORCID logo | Kazan Federal University
ORCID logo | Kazan Federal University
ORCID logo | Higher School of Economics University
ORCID logo | Liverpool Hope University

We investigated diachrony of distributional semantics of two competing Russian colour terms (CTs) for ‘brown’, buryj (11th century) and koričnevyj (17th century), using the Russian subcorpus of Google Books Ngram (2020). Time-series analysis (1800–2019) of bigrams gauged each term’s frequencies of occurrence and changes in combinability with nouns for natural objects, artefacts, abstract concepts and figurative expressions. In frequency, koričnevyj overtook buryj in the 1920s, confirming its basic status in modern Russian. The perplexity index indicates that koričnevyj steadily increased the range of denoted objects, with artefacts being front runners in the buryj-to-koričnevyj transition. The results corroborate Rakhilina’s (2007a, 2007b, 2008) hypothesis that an incipient CT initially collocates with nouns denoting artefacts but gradually expands to the realm of natural objects supplanting an old CT. Moreover, koričnevyj and buryj are discerned by denotations and connotations. The present findings provide insights into general mechanisms of the linguistic evolution of an emergent basic CT.

Keywords: “Russian browns”, computational linguistics, Google Books Ngram, colour term collocational dynamics, diachronic distributional analysis, linguistic colour term evolution
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1The Berlin-Kay hypothesis of basic colour categories
    • 1.2Evolution of basic colour categories as partitioning of colour space: Explanatory schemes and mechanisms
    • 1.3Evolution from a “proto-archaic” to a new hue-based basic colour category and term
    • 1.4Evolution of basic colour terms: A linguistic approach
    • 1.5Corpus analysis of the linguistic behaviour of colour terms
    • 1.6“Russian browns”: Etymology, history of emergence and linguistic behaviour
    • 1.7Hypothesis and aims of the present study
  • 2.Materials and Methods
    • 2.1Data source: Russian subcorpus of Google Books Ngram
    • 2.2Data cleansing and lemmatisation
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Dynamics of the occurrences of buryj and koričnevyj
    • 3.2Derivational morphology of buryj and koričnevyj
    • 3.3Frequency distribution of “Russian browns” in diachrony
    • 3.4Competition of the two Russian ‘brown’ terms
    • 3.5Nouns of object classes in bigrams: A diachronic analysis
    • 3.6Analysis of atypical contexts where koričnevyj collocates with nouns for natural objects
  • 4.Discussion
    • 4.1Summary of the major findings
    • 4.2Denotata of koričnevyj and buryj
    • 4.3Connotative meanings of koričnevyj and buryj
    • 4.4The koričnevyj term as a socio-cultural marker
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Supplementary materials
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 27 November 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.22013.boc
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