The semiosis of Swedish car colour names: Descriptive and amplifying functions

Gunnar Bergh | Department of Humanities, Mid-Sweden University, Sweden

This article deals with the different semiotic functions of complex car color names in Swedish. Based on a body of 150 authentic name types, collected from both newspapers and manufacturers’ catalogues, the study looks into the properties of these names from both a quantitative and qualitative perspective, discussing aspects such as morphological structure, information value, and status thinking as they apply to the data. The results of the analysis demonstrate that such color terminology is used to serve both descriptive and amplifying purposes, indicating that there is a complex interaction between physical and cultural aspects in the domain of car color semiosis. As a corollary of the patterns derived, it is argued that the car industry often seems to prefer connotation to denotation as its main color naming strategy.

Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

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Published online: 21 November 2007
https://doi.org/10.1075/z.137.22ber

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