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.