Displaying Language Diversity on the European Dictionary Portal. COST ENeL Case Study on Colours and Emotions and their cultural references (original) (raw)

Colour Terms in Five Linguistic Images of the World: The Semantic Perspective

GEMA Online® Journal of Language Studies, 2022

Social and cultural factors shape the linguistic perception of colour. At the same time, colour terms co-create the linguistic image of the world, which allows us to interpret reality and profile our statements and beliefs. This paper presents six basic colour terms: white, black, red, green, yellow, and blue (both as adjectives and as nouns) in the five different linguistic images of the world of the following languages: English, French, Italian, Polish, and Japanese. The methodological framework is based on cultural linguistics theory and the basis of semantics. The study explores denotative and connotative meanings of colour terms with their collocations. The data gathered from monolingual, bilingual, collocation, and phraseological dictionaries is analysed from the lexical-semantic point of view. The paper discusses semantic differences between contrasting cultures, especially in the blue-green and red lexis. Simultaneously, the findings point to transcultural and global aspects of colour meanings. Both the contexts of cultural diversity and of geographic location are emphasised in the colour semantics. Colours as linguistic signs can specify and categorise reality in terms of feelings, mental attitudes, or sensual reactions. The examined words also refer to location, nature, and the human body. The study shows that colour terms are multifunctional units in the linguistic image of the world, both in terms of the analysed languages separately and as an illustration of the cultural community of different ethnic languages.

Emotion and colour: Physiology, lexicalisation and conceptualisation

Journal of Foreign Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics, 2015

In English and in many other European languages, Croatian included, it is quite common to use colour terms as an indicator of different emotions. When we talk about colour and humans, we areactually referring to the colour of their skin, more precisely their face. The main goal of this study is to investigate the correlation between the primary colour terms in collocational units and their corresponding emotions in English and Croatian. Since most of the current research on emotion concepts has focused on English, we would like to provide further evidence from Croatian expressions of emotions. A cross-linguistic corpus-based analysis of the two language corpora (the British National Corpus and the Croatian National Corpus) in the first part of the paper should offer a better insight into the salience of basic emotion categories in reference to basic colour categories. The second part of the paper investigates the motivation behind some of the linguistic expressions within the framework of cognitive linguistics. Despite the obvious cross-linguistic differences as to the system of preference by which each language links colours and emotions, some systematic patterns, due to their motivational force, are likely to appear in both languages under study.

A Cross-Cultural Study on Colour Emotion and Colour Harmony

2004

This study investigates: (a) the relationship between colour combinations and adjective combinations and (b) to verify the colour harmony theory developed by Angela Wright (called the Wright theory in this study). Two experiments were carried out with subjects from the following six countries: Britain, China, France, Germany, Spain, and Sweden. In Experiment 1, 100 adjectives and 32 colours were used as stimuli presented on a calibrated Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) monitor. All the colour stimuli were selected evenly from four colour groups, CG 1 to CG 4, which were defined according to the Wright theory, and so were the adjectives, which were selected from four adjective groups, AG 1 to AG 4. In each trial of the experiment, four 5-colour wheels and one 5-adjective combination were presented altogether on the CRT. Subjects were asked to correlate one from the four colour wheels with the adjective combination presented. Experimental results show good agreement between the subject responses and the Wright theory, especially on AG 2. In Experiment 2, subjects were presented with two colour wheels in each trial and were asked to choose the one that appeared more harmonious than the other. Experimental results show good agreement between the subject responses and the Wright theory. The comparisons of experimental data between subject groups (from the six countries) show little cultural effect on colour harmony. A Cross-cultural Study on Colour Emotion and Colour Harmony. A Cross-cultural Study on Colour Emotion and Colour Harmony This study investigates: a) the relationship between colour combinations and adjective combinations and b) the verification of colour harmony theory developed by Angela Wright (the Wright theory). Two experiments were carried out with subjects from the 6 cultures: British, Chinese, French, German, Spanish, and Swedish. In the first experiment, 100 adjectives and 32 colours were used as stimuli presented on a calibrated Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) display. All the colour stimuli were selected evenly from the 4 colour groups, CG 1 to CG 4, defined by the Wright theory, and so were the adjectives, from AG 1 to AG 4. In the experiment 5-colour wheels and 5-adjective combinations were generated from the stimuli. Subjects were asked to correlate colour wheels with adjective combinations in terms of colour emotion. Experimental results show good agreement between subject responses and the Wright theory especially in AG 2. In Experiment 2, subjects were presented with 2 colour wheels for each trial and were asked to choose the one that appeared to harmonise better than the other. Experimental results show good agreement between subject responses and the Wright theory in all the CGs. The comparisons of experimental data between subject groups show little cultural effect on colour harmony, suggesting that colour harmony is independent of cultural context.

Chapter 11. Unifying research on colour and emotion

Progress in Colour Studies, 2018

Popular opinions link colours and emotions. Yet, affective connotations to colours are heterogeneous (e.g. red represents anger and love) partly because they relate to different contexts. Despite insufficient evidence, colours are used in applied settings (health, marketing, etc.) for their supposed effects on cognitive and affective functioning. Summarizing the literature, we invite for systematic research to investigate when and how colours link with affective phenomena. We need to i) distinguish between situations in which colours are physically shown or linguistically treated, ii) specify types of affective processes (e.g. emotion, mood, preference), and iii) investigate cross-cultural differences. Having these needs in mind, we initiated an international online survey on semantic colour-emotion associations. We outline theoretical considerations and present the survey's design.

European (dis)union of colours: secondary basic colour terms in Polish, Portuguese and Spanish

The paper proposes a cross-cultural and cross-geographical analysis of secondary basic colours, covering the languages of Polish, Portuguese and Spanish. Here, the selected words are violet, orange, pink and grey. However, these words still pertain to the class of Basic Colour Terms (as referred to in Berlin and Kay's hierarchy) as they are usually described as a mixture of two other (basic) colours (i.e. violet = red + blue; orange = yellow + red; pink = red + white; grey = black + white) – they are called secondary colour terms. Not only are they the least studied (in comparison to white, black and red), but they also seem more likely to highlight the potential differences between the languages in question. The study is essentially synchronic, but also contains information of diachronic nature (the etymology and, possibly, the history of considered terms). Having demonstrated the presence of violet, orange, pink and grey in the language (idioms, phrases, collocations, etc.), the authors go on to discuss the differences and similarities of colour terms geographical and linguistic ends of Europe have different colour visions.

A Cross-cultural study of emotional Responses on Colours

This article investigates human's emotional responses on coloursin Eastern Arabian Gulf culturebased on a questionnaire. Totally 10 colour options were evaluated (i.e. violet, orange, green, red, blue, yellow, black, gray, white and no color) by 80 subjects based on 12 basic descriptive variables including clean, fresh, liked, new, heavy, hard, warm, modern, active, tense, relaxing, concentration.White colour was associated with emotion: clean, new, relaxing and concentration. Yellow is associated with freshness; however, red is the most liked color. Black was linked with heavy, hard and tense emotions. Tense mood is associated with red. Insignificant differences between colourswith regard to warm mood were found. The link between colour preferences found for two topics living room and clothing and emotions elicited were discussed.

Analysis of cross-cultural color emotion

Color Research and Application, 2007

This study investigates the relationship between color perceptual attributes and color emotions, as well as the influence of different cultural backgrounds. Totally 214 color samples were evaluated on 12 emotion variables by subjects from seven different region groups in the psychophysical experiment. By factor analysis, it was found that three factors were sufficient to represent 80 “region-emotion” variables. For each variable, there is no distinct difference among different region groups. The 12 emotion variables could be divided into four categories, namely, activity index, potency index, definition index, and temperature index. Factor scores were further calculated to study the determinants on each factor. The analysis showed that the three factors were mainly related to chroma, lightness, and hue, respectively. It was concluded that chroma and lightness were the most important factors on color emotion, whereas the influences of hue and cultural background were very limited. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 32, 223–229, 2007

Is Comfort Purple or Green? Word-colour Associations in the First and Second Language

Metaphor in Foreign Language Instruction, 2019

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