Cover not available
Part of
Colour Studies: A broad spectrum
Edited by Wendy Anderson, Carole P. Biggam, Carole Hough and Christian Kay
[Not in series 191] 2014
► pp. 67–78

Linguistic categorization of BLUE in Standard Italian

The chapter aims to establish the status of three salient colour terms for blue: blu, azzurro and celeste, in the standard variety of Italian. A number of experiments were performed to examine the context-free and context-sensitive behaviour of blue terms. The results, consistent with previous studies, reveal that Italian speakers tend to distinguish lighter blue(s) from darker blue in daily speech, regarding them as autonomous categories. Although blu seems to be the most prevalent term, used with high consensus, both azzurro and celeste also tend to be salient high-frequency terms. The choice between azzurro and celeste depends on speakers’ dialectal background. Furthermore, it is conjectured which linguistic and non-linguistic factors tend to bias the linguistic categorization of colour terms in general.
Published online: 26 November 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/z.191.04uus
References (31)
Athanasopoulos, Panos. 2009. “Cognitive Representation of Colour in Bilinguals: The Case of Greek Blues.” Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 12 (1): 83–95. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Berlin, Brent, and Paul Kay. 1969. Basic Colour Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Biggam, C.P. 2012. The Semantics of Colour: A Historical Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bimler, David, and Mari Uusküla. 2014. “‘Clothed in Triple Blues’: Sorting Out the Italian Blues.” Journal of the Optical Society of America A 31 (4): A332–A340. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Borg, Alexander. 2011. “Towards a Diachrony of Maltese Basic Colour Terms.” In New Directions in Colour Studies, ed. by Carole P. Biggam, Carole A. Hough, Christian J. Kay, and David R. Simmons, 74–90. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cristofaro, Sonia, and Ignazio Putzu (eds.). 2000. Languages in the Mediterranean Area: Typology and Convergence. Milan: Francoangeli.Google Scholar
Davies, Ian R.L., and Greville G. Corbett. 1994. “The Basic Colour Terms of Russian.” Linguistics 32: 65–89. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Davies, Ian R.L., Greville G. Corbett, and José Bayo Margalef. 1995. “Colour Terms in Catalan: An Investigation of Eighty Informants, Concentrating on the Purple and Blue Regions.” Transactions of the Philological Society 93 (1): 17–49. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Davies, Ian R.L., Catriona MacDermid, Greville G. Corbett, Harry McGurk, David Jerrett, Tiny Jerrett, and Paul Sowden. 1992. “Color Terms in Setswana: A Linguistic and Perceptual Approach.” Linguistics 30: 1065–1103. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Deacy, Susan, and Alexandra Villing. 2004. “Athena Blues? Colour and Divinity in Ancient Greece.” In Colour in the Ancient Mediterranean World, ed. by Liza Cleland, Karen Stears, and Glenys Davies, 85–90. Oxford: John and Erica Hedges.Google Scholar
Fletcher, Robert. 1980. The City University Color Vision Test. 2nd ed. London: Keeler.Google Scholar
Giacalone Ramat, Anna. 1967. “Colori germanici nel mondo romanzo.” Atti e Memorie dell’Accademia Toscana di Scienze e Lettere “La Colombaria” 32: 107–211.Google Scholar
Grossmann, Maria. 1988. Colori e lessico: Studi sulla struttura semantica degli aggettivi di colore in catalano, castigliano, italiano, romeno ed ungherese. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.Google Scholar
Harris, Martin. 1988. “The Romance Languages.” InGoogle Scholar
The Romance Languages, ed. by Martin Harris and Nigel Vincent, 1–25.London: Routledge.
Kay, Paul, Brent Berlin, Luisa Maffi, William Merrifield, and Richard Cook. 2009. The World Color Survey. (= CSLI Lecture Notes, 159). Stanford, Calif.: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Lyons, John. 1977. Semantics, vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Nocentini, Alberto. 2004. L’Europa linguistica: Profilo storico e tipologico. Florence: Le Monnier università.Google Scholar
Özgen, Emre, and Ian R.L. Davies. 1998. “Turkish Color Terms: Tests of Berlin and Kay’s Theory of Color Universals and Linguistic Relativity.” Linguistics 36 (5): 919–956. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Paggetti, Giulia, Guido Bartoli, and Gloria Menegaz. 2011. “Re-locating Colors in the OSA Space.” Attention, Perception and Psychophysics 73 (2): 491–503. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Paramei, Galina. 2005. “Singing the Russian Blues: An Argument for Culturally Basic Color Terms.” Cross-Cultural Research 39: 10–34. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Paramei, Galina, and Gloria Menegaz. 2013. “ ‘Italian Blues’: A Challenge to the Universal Inventory of Basic Colour Terms.” In Colour and Colorimetry: Multidisciplinary Contributions, vol. 20, ed. by Maurizio Rossi, 164–167. Rimini: Maggioli Editore.Google Scholar
Philip, Gill. 2006. “Connotative Meaning in English and Italian Colour-Word Metaphors.” metaphorik.de 10: 59–93.Google Scholar
Ronga, Irene. 2009. “L’eccezione dell’azzurro: il lessico cromatico, fra scienza e società.” Cuadernos de Filologia Italiana 16: 57–79.Google Scholar
Sandford, Jodi. 2011. “ Blu, azzurro, celeste – What Color is Blue for Italian Speakers Compared to English Speakers?” In Colour and Colorimetry: Multidisciplinary Contributions, Vol. VII B, ed. by Maurizio Rossi, 281–288. Rimini: Maggioli Editore.Google Scholar
Sutrop, Urmas. 2001. “List Task and a Cognitive Salience Index.” Field Methods 13: 263–276. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Taylor, John R. 2003. Linguistic Categorization. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Thierry, Guillaume, Panos Athanasopoulos, Alison Wiggett, Benjamin Dering, and Jan-Rouke Kuipers. 2009. “Unconscious Effects of Language-Specific Terminology on Pre-Attentive Color Perception.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 106 (11): 4567–4570. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Uusküla, Mari. 2011. “Terms for Red in Central Europe.” In New Directions in Colour Studies, ed. by Carole P. Biggam, Carole A. Hough, Christian J. Kay, and David R. Simmons, 147–156. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. Forthcoming. “Mediterranean Ecology and the Colour Blue in Standard Italian.” In The Language of Colour in the Mediterranean, ed. by Alexander Borg. 2nd ed. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz.
Vincent, Nigel. 1988. “Italian”. In The Romance Languages, ed. by Martin Harris and Nigel Vincent, 279–313. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Cited by (4)

Cited by four other publications

Del Viva, Maria Michela, Serena Castellotti & Galina V. Paramei
2023. The Italian colour lexicon in Tuscany: elicited lists, cognitive salience, and semantic maps of colour terms. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 10:1 DOI logo
Uusküla, Mari, Christine Mohr, Déborah Epicoco & Domicele Jonauskaite
2023. Is Purple Lost in Translation? The Affective Meaning of Purple, Violet, and Lilac Cognates in 16 Languages and 30 Populations. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 52:3 ► pp. 853 ff. DOI logo
Del Viva, Maria Michela, Ilaria Mariani, Carmen De Caro & Galina V. Paramei
2022. Florence “blues” are clothed in triple basic terms. i-Perception 13:5 ► pp. 204166952211249 ff. DOI logo
Lindsey, Delwin T. & Angela M. Brown
2021. Lexical Color Categories. Annual Review of Vision Science 7:1 ► pp. 605 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 30 september 2024. 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.