Cover not available
Part of
Embodiment in Latin Semantics
Edited by William Michael Short
[Studies in Language Companion Series 174] 2016
► pp. 177–208

Abstract and embodied colors in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History

| The University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Some prominent, recent research on Latin color language asserts that the ancient Romans mostly lacked abstract color concepts, instead conceiving of “color” as intimately connected with the material substances that Latin color terms typically referred to. This chapter, through a detailed study of Pliny the Elder’s color language, shows not only that the Romans were fully capable of forming and expressing abstract color concepts, but also that they expressed relationships among these concepts using structured metaphors of location and motion in an abstract color space. The evidence from Pliny also suggests that these expressions derived from the everyday language of artisans, merchants, and farmers, and thus appear more frequently in technical, rather than literary, Latin.

Keywords: abstract color concepts, color space, Latin color terms, structured metaphor
Published online: 11 May 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.174.07wha
References
Adams, John
1995 Pelagonius and Latin Veterinary Terminology in the Roman Empire. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Arias Abellàn, Carmen
1994 Estructura Semántica de los Adjetivos de Color en los Tratadistas Latinos de Agricultura y Parte de la Enciclopedia de Plinio. Seville: Secretariado de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Sevilla.Google Scholar
André, Jean
1949 Étude sur les termes de couleur dans la langue latine. Paris: Klincksieck.Google Scholar
Baran, Neculai
1983 Les caractéristiques essentielles du vocabulaire chromatique latin. ANRW II 29(1): 321-411.Google Scholar
Berlin, Brent & Kay, Paul
1969 Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Biggam, Carole
2012 The Semantics of Colour. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Borg, Alexander
(ed.) 1999 The Language of Color in the Mediterranean. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell.Google Scholar
Bradley, Mark
2004 The colour blush in ancient Rome. In Colour in the Ancient Mediterranean World, Liza Cleland, Karen Stears & Glenys Davies (eds), 117–21. Oxford: Archaeopress.Google Scholar
2006 Colour and marble in early imperial Rome. Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 52: 1–22.
2009 Colour and Meaning in Ancient Rome. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Clarke, M
2004 The semantics of colour in the early Greek word-hoard. In Colour in the Ancient Mediterranean World, Liza Cleland, Karen Stears & Glenys Davies (eds), 131–39. Oxford: Archaeopress.Google Scholar
Conklin, Harold
1955 Hanunóo color categories. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 11(4): 339–44. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cruse, Alan
1986 Lexical Semantics. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Cruse, Alan & Croft, William
2004 Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Devine, Andrew & Stephens, Laurence
2013 Semantics for Latin. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Edgeworth, Robert
1992 The Colors of the Aeneid. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Fedriani, Chiara
2011 Experiential metaphors in Latin: Feelings were containers, movements and things possessed. Transactions of the Philological Society 109(3): 307–326. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fillmore, Charles
1982 Describing polysemy: The case of ‘crawl’. In Polysemy: Theoretical and Computational Approaches, Yael Ravin & Claudia Leacock (eds), 91–110. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Fruyt, Michèle
2006 La lexicalisation et la conceptualisation de la couleur dans les textes techniques et scientifiques latins. In L’écriture du Texte Scientifique au Moyen Age, Claude Thomasset (ed.), 13‒47. Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne.Google Scholar
Geeraerts, Dirk
1993 Vagueness’s puzzles, polysemy’s vagaries. Cognitive Linguistics 4: 229–72. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2010 Theories of Lexical Semantics. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Goldman, Rachael
2013 Color-Terms in Social and Cultural Context in Ancient Rome. Piscataway NJ: Gorgias.Google Scholar
Hanks, Patrick
2013 Lexical Analysis. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hautala, Svetlana
2014 Piante. In Con i Romani: Un’antropologia della Cultura Antica, Maurizio Bettini & William Short (eds), 269–86. Bologna: Il Mulino.Google Scholar
Heider, Eleanor
1971 ‘Focal’ color areas and the development of color names. Developmental Psychology 4(3): 447–55. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Heider, Eleanor & Olivier, Donald
1972 The structure of the color space in naming and memory for two languages. Cognitive Psychology 3(2): 337–54. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hering, Ewald
1964 Outlines of the Theory of the Light Sense. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Jekl, Á
2011 Verbal prefixation in Classical Latin and in English: The prefix ex-. In Formal Linguistics and the Teaching of Latin, Renato Oniga, Rossella Iovino & Giuliana Giusti (eds), 201–214. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.Google Scholar
Kay, Paul & McDaniel, Chad
1978 The linguistic significance of the meanings of basic color terms. Language 54: 610–646. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1975 Color Categories As Fuzzy Sets. Berkeley CA: University of California Language Behavior Research Laboratory.Google Scholar
Kay, Paul & Maffi, Luisa
1999 Color appearance and the emergence and evolution of basic color lexicons. American Anthropologist 101: 743–60. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kay, Paul & Regier, Terry
2006 Language, thought and color: Recent developments. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 10: 51–54. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kay, Paul, Berlin, Brent, Maffi, Luisa, Merrifield, William & Cook, Richard
2009 The World Color Survey. Stanford CA: CSLI.Google Scholar
Kay, Paul
2005 Color categories are not arbitrary. Cross-Cultural Research 39(1): 39–55. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kristol, Andres
1980 Color systems in Southern Italy: A case of regression. Language 56(1): 137–145. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lakoff, George & Johnson, Mark
1980 Metaphors We Live by. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Lakoff, George & Turner, Mark
1989 More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lakoff, George
1987 Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lupker, Stephen
2007 Representation and processing of lexically ambiguous words. In The Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics, Gareth Gaskell (ed.), 159–74. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Langacker, Ronald
1987 Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Laughton, Eric
1948  Flavus pudor . Classical Review 62: 109‒10. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1950  Flavus again. Classical Review 64: 88‒89. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, Barbara
2007 Polysemy, prototypes, and radial categories. In The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, Dirk Geeraerts & Hubert Cuyckens (eds), 139‒69. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Lindsey, Delwin & Brown, Angela
2009 World color survey color naming reveals universal motifs and their within-language diversity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 106(47): 19785‒90. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lyons, John
1999 The vocabulary of colour with particular reference to ancient Greek and Classical Latin. In The Language of Colour in the Mediterranean. Alexander Borg (ed.), 38-75. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell.Google Scholar
MacLaury, Robert E
1997 Color and Cognition in Mesoamerica: Constructing Categories as Vantages. University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Oniga, Renato
2007 La terminologia del colore in latino tra relativismo e universalismo. Aevum Antiquum 7: 269‒84.Google Scholar
Regier, Terry, Kay, Paul & Cook, Richard
2005 Focal colors are universal after all. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 102(23): 8386‒8391. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Roberson, Debi, Davies, Ian & Davidoff, Jules
2000 Color categories are not universal: Replications and new evidence from stone-age culture. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 129: 360‒98. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Saunders, Barbara
1992 The Invention of Basic Colour Terms. Utrecht: Rijksuniversiteit te Utrecht-ISOR.Google Scholar
2000 Revisiting basic color terms. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 6(1): 81‒99. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Saunders, Barbara & van Brakel, Jaap
1988 Re-evaluating basic colour terms. Cultural Dynamics 1: 359‒78. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1997 Are there nontrivial constraints on colour categorization? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 20(2): 176‒79. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1999 Colour word trouble. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22(4): 725‒729. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Seidenberg, Mark, Tanenhaus, Michael, Leman, James & Bienkowski, Marie
1982 Automatic access of meanings of ambiguous words in context: Some limitations of knowledge-based processing. Cognitive Psychology 14: 489‒532. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Short, William
2013 Latin Dē: A view from cognitive semantics. Classical Antiquity 32(2): 378‒405. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Steinvall, Anders
2006 Basic colour terms and type modification: Meaning in relation to function, salience and correlating attributes. In Progress in Colour Studies, Carole Biggam & Christian Kay (eds), 57‒71. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2002 English Colour Terms in Context. Umeå: Umeå University Press.Google Scholar
Swinney, David
1979 Lexical access during sentence comprehension: (Re)consideration of context effects. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 18: 645‒69. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1982 The structure and time-course of information interaction during speech comprehension: Lexical segmentation, access and interpretation. In Perspectives on Mental Representation: Experimental and Theoretical Studies of Cognitive Processes and Capacities, Jacques Mehler, Edward Walker & Merrill Garrett (eds), 151‒67. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Talmy, Leonard
2000 Toward a Cognitive Semantics. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Tuggy, David
1993 Ambiguity, polysemy, and vagueness. Cognitive Linguistics 4: 273‒290. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1999 Linguistic evidence for polysemy in the mind: A response to William Croft and Dominiek Sandra. Cognitive Linguistics 10: 343‒68.Google Scholar
Wharton, David
2009 On the distribution of adnominal prepositional phrases in Latin prose. Classical Philology 104(2): 184‒207. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wierzbicka, Anna
2008 Why there are no ‘colour universals’ in language and thought. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 142(2): 407‒25. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zadeh, Lotfi
1965 Fuzzy sets. Information and Control 8(3): 338‒53. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Becker, Hilary
2022. Pigment nomenclature in the ancient Near East, Greece, and Rome. Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 14:1 DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 12 march 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.