Lexical change often begins and ends in semantic
peripheries
Evidence from color linguistics
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.
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
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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
https://spraakbanken.gu.se/korp/#?stats_reduce=word&cqp=%5B%5D&word_pic&corpus=romi,romii,rom99,storsuc,romg&search=word%7CINSERTSEARCHWORD&result_tab=4
English:
COHA corpus, Corpus of Historical American
English, in total 400 million tokens. Available at https://corpus.byu.edu/coha/. Accessed 1 September 2018.
Cited by
Cited by 3 other publications
Griber, Yulia A., Dimitris Mylonas & Galina V. Paramei
2021.
Intergenerational differences in Russian color naming in the globalized era: linguistic analysis.
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 8:1
Griber, Yulia Alexandrovna
2020.
Gerontolinguistics of color: research overview.
Litera :5
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Vulić, Ivan, Simon Baker, Edoardo Maria Ponti, Ulla Petti, Ira Leviant, Kelly Wing, Olga Majewska, Eden Bar, Matt Malone, Thierry Poibeau, Roi Reichart & Anna Korhonen
2021.
Multi-SimLex: A Large-Scale Evaluation of Multilingual and Crosslingual Lexical Semantic Similarity.
Computational Linguistics 46:4
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