In this essay, I will critically explore “colour” as a category in cross-linguistic semantics. Contrasting Berlin and Kay’s paradigm of “Basic Colour Terms” with Wierzbicka’s paradigm of “Visual Semantics”, the aim is partly to make explicit the inherent problems within the Basic Colour Terms tradition, but also to envision a new role and place for “colour” within a broader paradigm of Visual Semantics. Arguing for an approach based on the Humboldtian principle of “no outside to language”, on linguacultural relativity, and on emic-based analytical commitments, the essay proposes a broad, environmental cosmovision of Visual Semantics that allows for a renewal of the study of language, culture, and vision.

How do we structure the conceptual nature of language and our experience of colour? I discuss one of the ways in which we do this through the construction [WITH *COLOUR]. With is one of the three most frequent prepositions used with colour terms, as is evident from the Corpus of Contemporary American English. The sense elaboration of this construction stems from conceptual metaphors such as COLOURS are possessions / accompaniment / instruments. This paper presents the construction and proposes a description of the statistically significant embodied patterns English speakers use in its conceptualisation. It considers how image schemas and conceptual metaphors combine to reflect the different senses of with and proposes a mapping of the corpus data.

Colours are regularly linked to emotions in behaviour and languages. While research on conceptual colour-emotion correspondences is accumulating, we know little as to whether colour influences felt affective states. Such research should inquire about what people currently feel (self-reported emotions) or assess psychophysiological changes. We reviewed thirty-one studies targeting colour and felt affective states. Only eight of them immersed participants in coloured environments, real or virtual, and accounted for lightness and/or chroma in addition to hue. Results of these eight studies were inconsistent. We observed tendencies hinting at higher physiological arousal in warm and more chromatic environments. We need more systematic studies before we can conclude that colour impacts felt affective states.

We verify the possible relationships between the colour names and their respective preferences in adults and children. 300 adults took an online test (mean age = 30 years; SD = 1.02) and 52 children in person (23 aged 6 years; 29 aged 7 years), consisting of ordering 8 colours according to personal preference. Except for the colours brown and blue, the least and most preferred in both groups, we did not find relationships between the preferences. Also, the considerable differences between the ranking of colour names and that of the corresponding colour preferences show that personal preference does not have much impact on the learning of colour names and is probably related to other factors, such as context and culture.

Previous studies have indicated that some colour idioms are recognised universally, and others are culture-specific. This study compared the colour idioms of three languages from different language families: Swedish (Indo-European, Germanic); Estonian (Finno-Ugric, Finnic); Turkish (Altai, Turkic). Cognitive Metaphor Theory was used for qualitatively analysing the idioms. The results indicated that there was a large overlap in the conceptual metaphors that each language recognised. Some idioms that appeared opaque judging by their linguistic form only proved to be quite transparent when the motivations behind them were identified. The comparative examination of colour idioms across different language families provides a unique opportunity for deepening our comprehension of the extent to which cultural variations shape the way we perceive the world.

Among languages that recognise different categories for ‘blue’ and ‘green’ in their colour lexicons, some further partition ‘blue’ according to lightness. We asked whether this subdivision would affect the ‘blue’/‘green’ boundary. We identified this boundary in seven European languages, using a dataset in which speakers of each language gave colour names to sixty-five standardised colour samples. The frequencies of ‘blue’- and ‘green’-naming for each sample were expressed as functions of hue-angle, with the angle where the two functions cross being the category boundary. No differences were found between languages with or without separate basic terms for ‘light blue’, implying that the emergence of these ‘light blue’ terms is not caused by reduced salience or coverage of ‘blueness’.

This study examines sex- and romance-themed non-transparent English lipstick colour names in online shopping. A sample of lipstick colour names was manually collected from twelve brand websites and categorised semantically. The study focuses on a subset of 148 lipstick colour names in the sex and romance category, discussing their symbolic associations and naming conventions. The analysis reveals that while non-transparent colour names referencing sex and romance often evoke associations with red and pink, they lack the precision of both basic colour terms and non-basic terms. The findings suggest that obscure names prioritise connotations over denotations, aiming to evoke consumer desire or enhance perceptions of attractiveness. While these naming conventions appeal to consumers, adding supplementary descriptions could improve clarity without compromising their intended allure.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the use of the term for green, zielony, in the press released in Poland in 1945–1963 and in 2010. The data have been extracted from ChronoPress: Portal Tekstów Prasowych (Pawłowski 2021), a corpus of Polish newspapers and magazines, and the National Corpus of Polish (Narodowy Korpus Języka Polskiego). At the time of writing this paper, the number of the occurrences of zielony in ChronoPress amounts to 1,761. Our analysis reveals that the dominant uses of zielony in ChronoPress texts mainly relate to vegetation, including agriculture, although this word also happens to be used in other contexts. In 2010, zielony is mainly employed in the context of ecology and parks in urban areas.

In linguistic colour semantics, lightness words have often been perceived as modifying elements of other colour expressions in languages with established, such as basic, colour terms. However, lightness words can also appear independently. This study focusses on the Finnish lightness words tumma ‘dark’ and vaalea ‘light’ as independently occurring colour words. The analysis was conducted as a qualitative corpus analysis within the frameworks of cognitive semantics. The meanings of the words tumma and vaalea were analysed in different usage situations, and the results reveal that, depending on the context, lightness of colour is conceptualised in different ways in the use of these words, and that, in the use of tumma and vaalea, the whole concept of colour, not only lightness, can be conceptualised.

Important differences in the categorisation and labelling of orange were found in data collected in 2021 from two generations of Galician speakers. Young adults strongly agreed on orange being an independent category labelled laranxa (‘orange’) or its Spanish cognate naranja. Elderly participants had much lower consensus rates. Some shared the semantic extension and the label(s) of their young counterparts while others used the label color butano (‘butane gas bottle-coloured’) for highly saturated orange samples alone. Half of them, however, used categories such as red+orange (labelled encarnado, roxo or the Spanish cognate rojo), yellow+orange (amarelo, marelo or the Spanish cognate amarillo) and pink+orange (rosa). These contrasts suggest two stages of linguistic assimilation towards Spanish and illustrate the increasing linguistic pressure that Galician faces in a diglossic context.

The aim of this paper is to investigate how the noun beż and adjective beżowy ‘beige’, borrowed from French, are understood by Polish speakers. In a survey study, 100 participants (50 women and 50 men) were asked to write down their own definitions of beige as well as to provide associations and names of objects (both natural and artificial) and phenomena which are typically beige. The results of the survey indicate that Polish speakers perceive this colour as a mixture of brown and white, and they point to sand and white coffee as possible candidates for prototypical references of the adjective beżowy.

In this essay, I will critically explore “colour” as a category in cross-linguistic semantics. Contrasting Berlin and Kay’s paradigm of “Basic Colour Terms” with Wierzbicka’s paradigm of “Visual Semantics”, the aim is partly to make explicit the inherent problems within the Basic Colour Terms tradition, but also to envision a new role and place for “colour” within a broader paradigm of Visual Semantics. Arguing for an approach based on the Humboldtian principle of “no outside to language”, on linguacultural relativity, and on emic-based analytical commitments, the essay proposes a broad, environmental cosmovision of Visual Semantics that allows for a renewal of the study of language, culture, and vision.

How do we structure the conceptual nature of language and our experience of colour? I discuss one of the ways in which we do this through the construction [WITH *COLOUR]. With is one of the three most frequent prepositions used with colour terms, as is evident from the Corpus of Contemporary American English. The sense elaboration of this construction stems from conceptual metaphors such as COLOURS are possessions / accompaniment / instruments. This paper presents the construction and proposes a description of the statistically significant embodied patterns English speakers use in its conceptualisation. It considers how image schemas and conceptual metaphors combine to reflect the different senses of with and proposes a mapping of the corpus data.

Colours are regularly linked to emotions in behaviour and languages. While research on conceptual colour-emotion correspondences is accumulating, we know little as to whether colour influences felt affective states. Such research should inquire about what people currently feel (self-reported emotions) or assess psychophysiological changes. We reviewed thirty-one studies targeting colour and felt affective states. Only eight of them immersed participants in coloured environments, real or virtual, and accounted for lightness and/or chroma in addition to hue. Results of these eight studies were inconsistent. We observed tendencies hinting at higher physiological arousal in warm and more chromatic environments. We need more systematic studies before we can conclude that colour impacts felt affective states.

We verify the possible relationships between the colour names and their respective preferences in adults and children. 300 adults took an online test (mean age = 30 years; SD = 1.02) and 52 children in person (23 aged 6 years; 29 aged 7 years), consisting of ordering 8 colours according to personal preference. Except for the colours brown and blue, the least and most preferred in both groups, we did not find relationships between the preferences. Also, the considerable differences between the ranking of colour names and that of the corresponding colour preferences show that personal preference does not have much impact on the learning of colour names and is probably related to other factors, such as context and culture.

Previous studies have indicated that some colour idioms are recognised universally, and others are culture-specific. This study compared the colour idioms of three languages from different language families: Swedish (Indo-European, Germanic); Estonian (Finno-Ugric, Finnic); Turkish (Altai, Turkic). Cognitive Metaphor Theory was used for qualitatively analysing the idioms. The results indicated that there was a large overlap in the conceptual metaphors that each language recognised. Some idioms that appeared opaque judging by their linguistic form only proved to be quite transparent when the motivations behind them were identified. The comparative examination of colour idioms across different language families provides a unique opportunity for deepening our comprehension of the extent to which cultural variations shape the way we perceive the world.

Among languages that recognise different categories for ‘blue’ and ‘green’ in their colour lexicons, some further partition ‘blue’ according to lightness. We asked whether this subdivision would affect the ‘blue’/‘green’ boundary. We identified this boundary in seven European languages, using a dataset in which speakers of each language gave colour names to sixty-five standardised colour samples. The frequencies of ‘blue’- and ‘green’-naming for each sample were expressed as functions of hue-angle, with the angle where the two functions cross being the category boundary. No differences were found between languages with or without separate basic terms for ‘light blue’, implying that the emergence of these ‘light blue’ terms is not caused by reduced salience or coverage of ‘blueness’.

This study examines sex- and romance-themed non-transparent English lipstick colour names in online shopping. A sample of lipstick colour names was manually collected from twelve brand websites and categorised semantically. The study focuses on a subset of 148 lipstick colour names in the sex and romance category, discussing their symbolic associations and naming conventions. The analysis reveals that while non-transparent colour names referencing sex and romance often evoke associations with red and pink, they lack the precision of both basic colour terms and non-basic terms. The findings suggest that obscure names prioritise connotations over denotations, aiming to evoke consumer desire or enhance perceptions of attractiveness. While these naming conventions appeal to consumers, adding supplementary descriptions could improve clarity without compromising their intended allure.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the use of the term for green, zielony, in the press released in Poland in 1945–1963 and in 2010. The data have been extracted from ChronoPress: Portal Tekstów Prasowych (Pawłowski 2021), a corpus of Polish newspapers and magazines, and the National Corpus of Polish (Narodowy Korpus Języka Polskiego). At the time of writing this paper, the number of the occurrences of zielony in ChronoPress amounts to 1,761. Our analysis reveals that the dominant uses of zielony in ChronoPress texts mainly relate to vegetation, including agriculture, although this word also happens to be used in other contexts. In 2010, zielony is mainly employed in the context of ecology and parks in urban areas.

In linguistic colour semantics, lightness words have often been perceived as modifying elements of other colour expressions in languages with established, such as basic, colour terms. However, lightness words can also appear independently. This study focusses on the Finnish lightness words tumma ‘dark’ and vaalea ‘light’ as independently occurring colour words. The analysis was conducted as a qualitative corpus analysis within the frameworks of cognitive semantics. The meanings of the words tumma and vaalea were analysed in different usage situations, and the results reveal that, depending on the context, lightness of colour is conceptualised in different ways in the use of these words, and that, in the use of tumma and vaalea, the whole concept of colour, not only lightness, can be conceptualised.

Important differences in the categorisation and labelling of orange were found in data collected in 2021 from two generations of Galician speakers. Young adults strongly agreed on orange being an independent category labelled laranxa (‘orange’) or its Spanish cognate naranja. Elderly participants had much lower consensus rates. Some shared the semantic extension and the label(s) of their young counterparts while others used the label color butano (‘butane gas bottle-coloured’) for highly saturated orange samples alone. Half of them, however, used categories such as red+orange (labelled encarnado, roxo or the Spanish cognate rojo), yellow+orange (amarelo, marelo or the Spanish cognate amarillo) and pink+orange (rosa). These contrasts suggest two stages of linguistic assimilation towards Spanish and illustrate the increasing linguistic pressure that Galician faces in a diglossic context.

The aim of this paper is to investigate how the noun beż and adjective beżowy ‘beige’, borrowed from French, are understood by Polish speakers. In a survey study, 100 participants (50 women and 50 men) were asked to write down their own definitions of beige as well as to provide associations and names of objects (both natural and artificial) and phenomena which are typically beige. The results of the survey indicate that Polish speakers perceive this colour as a mixture of brown and white, and they point to sand and white coffee as possible candidates for prototypical references of the adjective beżowy.