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Article published In:
The Dynamics of Lexical Innovation: Data, methods, models
Edited by Daphné Kerremans, Jelena Prokić, Quirin Würschinger and Hans-Jörg Schmid
[Pragmatics & Cognition 25:1] 2018
► pp. 50–85

Lexical change often begins and ends in semantic peripheries

Evidence from color linguistics

| Stockholm University,
The article discusses semantic change and lexical replacement processes in the color domain, based on color naming studies in seven Germanic languages (where diachronic intra-linguistic development is inferred from cross-linguistic synchronic studies) and from different generations of speakers in a single language (Swedish). Change in the color domain often begins and ends in conceptual peripheries, and I argue that this perspective is suitable for other semantic domains as well.
Keywords: color linguistics, lexical typology, lexical semantics, cognitive linguistics, Germanic languages, Swedish
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Onomasiological perspective: New color categories often arise in overlapping peripheries
    • 2.2Semasiological perspective: New color terms appear in discourse peripheries
    • 2.3Inferring diachronic intra-linguistic development from cross-linguistic synchronic studies
  • 3.Study 1: A cross-linguistic study of Germanic pink and purple
    • 3.1Background
    • 3.2Method and data
    • 3.3Subjects
    • 3.4Results
  • 4.Study 2: An intra-linguistic “diachronic” study of Swedish pink and purple
    • 4.1Background
    • 4.2Subjects
    • 4.3Method
    • 4.4Results
  • 5.Discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Notes on corpora
Published online: 12 June 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.00005.vej
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Notes on corpora
Swedish:
Spraakbanken, historical fiction novels in the romi, romii, rom99, storsuc, and romg subcorpora, in total 22.41 millions tokens. Available at https://​spraakbanken​.gu​.se. Accessed 1 September 2018. The specific subcorpora can most easily be accessed through the following link, by replacing “INSERTSEARCHWORD” with your search word
German:
DWDS corpus. Digitale Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache, in total 417 million tokens. Available at https://​www​.dwds​.de. Accessed 1 September 2018. The specific corpora can most easily be accessed through the following link, by replacing “INSERTSEARCHWORD” with your search word.
Google English Ngrams, based on the Google Books corpus, version 2012, in total 350 billion tokens. Available https://​books​.google​.com​/ngrams. Accessed 1 September 2018.
Google German Ngrams, based on the Google Books corpus, version 2012, in total 50 billion tokens. Available https://​books​.google​.com​/ngrams, accessed 1 September 2018.
The Google Ngram raw data is most readily accessible through Matt Nicklay’s (Github username: econpy) python code https://​github​.com​/econpy​/google​-ngrams​​/blob​/master​/getngrams​.py. Accessed 1 September 2018
English:
COHA corpus, Corpus of Historical American English, in total 400 million tokens. Available at https://​corpus​.byu​.edu​/coha/. Accessed 1 September 2018.
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