Chapter published in:
Lexicalization patterns in color naming: A cross-linguistic perspective
Edited by Ida Raffaelli, Daniela Katunar and Barbara Kerovec
[Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics 78] 2019
► pp. 213–234

Complex color denomination in French and Occitan

| University of Oxford
| University of Lyon
| Lattice, CNRS, ENS & Université Sorbonne Nouvelle

In this chapter, we investigate color naming in French and Occitan. It is well known that French, compared to other Romance languages, has a tendency to be very analytic. This raises the following question: do speakers of French and other Romance languages (here, Occitan) differ in morphological strategies used to express meaning in the semantic domain of color? To investigate this question, we compare the color descriptions provided by speakers of French (N = 20) and speakers of Occitan (N = 20). The results show some striking differences between the two languages in lexical and morphosyntactic strategies used to name colors. Speakers of Occitan employ secondary color terms using a variety of derivational suffixes, which are absent from the French data despite their existence in the language.

Keywords: morphological complexity, experimental studies, Occitan, French, color naming, Romance
Published online: 09 October 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/sfsl.78.10bac
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