Colour adjectives or colour nouns (original) (raw)

2011

Abstract

Colour adjectives or colour nouns?This paper presents partial results of corpus research into colour terms. Our focus here is on lexical-class membership. Colour terms are known to be either adjectives or nouns. But there may be cases where they have too easily been classified as adjectives.When a phrase headed by a colour term (or a colour compound) occurs in predicative position, this colour term is sometimes unequivocally a noun, witness the indefinite article:1) BNC B7G The motorcycle was a bright red. It belonged to the Post Office.These alternate with articleless occurrences:2) BNC BP1 […] touching the reeds with golden fingers so that they were bright yellow.In 2), nothing in principle rules out the (uncountable) noun analysis. However, we have found few occurrences of articleless bright/dark/light/pale colour in predicative position in the BNC, a finding which supports the adjectival reading.But it is striking that when bright/dark/light/pale appear in the comparative form i...

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