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.
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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.
Lindsey, Delwin T. & Angela M. Brown
2021. Lexical Color Categories. Annual Review of Vision Science 7:1 ► pp. 605 ff.
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.
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