engleski

Partition of colour space and conventionalization: what two methods can reveal about colour terms in Croatian

The present paper is based on a research conducted within the project Evolution of Semantic Systems, EOSS (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics) that aimed to collect data from 50 IE languages. Research of colour terms consisted of several different trials with 20 adult participants. In this paper results from the colour-naming task is presented. Informants were asked to name 84 colour shades from the Munsell colour chips. The collected data consisted of 1680 full responses in total, out of which 165 were diverse colour terms. Terms used for colour naming can be one, two or three words units. Out of 165 different terms, 30 terms are one word units, 108 are two words units and 25 terms are three words units. Except basic colour terms and some loan words like bež „beige“, one word units are terms that are formed via metonymy and suffixation, like maslinasta „olive like“. Two words units are modified with adjectives, such as plavo-zelena “blue-green”. They are related to the chroma dimension of the Munsell system. When formed with adverbs such as svijetlo “light”, tamno “dark”, jarko “bright”, zagasito “dim”, these type of two words units relate to either hue or lightness dimension. Three words units consist of two adverbs and an adjective. The first adverb is an intensifier like jako svijetlo zelena “very light green”. Such terms mostly refer to lightness. The frequency data from the EOSS project have been compared to the frequency data from the Croatian n-gram system (based on the Web as Corpus approach) consisting of 1.72 billion tokens (Dembitz et al., 2014). The 165 colour terms were checked in the Croatian n-gram system in order to provide evidence about their attestation in a large language resource

color spectrum; evolution of semantic systems; conventionalization; Croatian

nije evidentirano