engleski

Red and white in language and mind

The present paper investigates some of the linguistic expressions containing the adjectives red and white in English, German and Croatian. Special attention is paid, on the one hand, to highlighting the complexity of conceptual color categories that remain rather schematic in a communication act if only labeled as the underspecified adjectives red and white. On the other hand, metaphor and metonymy will be shown to be responsible for rendering in language some more specific color nuances and/or for unequivocal conceptual reading of the otherwise nontransparent simple adjectives red or white. Despite the obvious cross-linguistic differences in the inventories of color lexemes or expressions containing them among these three languages, it is the principle of using more or less common aspects of our immediate surroundings (in metaphor) and of using more generally shared knowledge structures (in metonymy) that allows some patterns to emerge.

cognitive processes, metonymy, metaphor, color lexemes

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