COLLOCATION AND CONNOTATION: - AMS Acta

384 Pages·2006·0.94 MB·English

COLLOCATION AND CONNOTATION:

A Corpus-Based Investigation Of Colour Words
In English And Italian

by
Gillian Susan Philip

a thesis submitted to
The University of Birmingham
for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

School of English
The University of Birmingham
March 2003
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To

M&D, M&B, and Ame

and to ENEL, who made the end so memorable

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Acknowledgements

A number of people have need of acknowledgement for the part they have played
in this finished work.

In the first place, there are the people responsible for getting me started in corpus
linguistics – and who have helped guide me through this research: Elena Tognini
Bonelli, John Sinclair, Geoff Barnbrook, and Bill Louw have all played a
significant part, and I thank them warmly.

Without the corpus providers, this research would of course have been impossible
to carry out. Thanks are therefore due to the team at COBUILD for access to the
Bank of English, and to Rema Rossini Favretti, director of the University of
Bologna’s Centro Interfacoltà di Linguistica Teorica ed Applicata “Luigi
Heilmann”, who kindly made the Italian CORIS data available to me.

But it takes more than data and theory to write a thesis. In a time of inadequate
funding for research in the humanities, I express my heartfelt thanks to those who
believe in its worth and are prepared to finance it. Half of the fees for this course
of studies were paid the University of Birmingham’s part-time student bursary.
The remainder was paid by my father, whom I will have to keep in Chianti and
mortadella for a good few years to come.

Working in Italy, I have found the distance from fellow PhD students isolating
and difficult. I must therefore thank those work colleagues – especially Kay, Julia,
Stefy, and Fabio – whose interest and encouragement in my work have kept me
going through good times and bad.

My greatest thanks are reserved for my loved ones. Amedeo, Betty, Ally, Lorna,
Dave and the boys, who provided (in no particular order): advice, support,
encouragement, shoulders to cry on, proofreading services... as well as their
unconditional love.

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Abstract

Many linguistic expressions are constructed around colour words: ‘see red’, ‘green with
envy’, ‘whiter than white’. They appear to confirm the existence of connotative meanings,
and are often cited in commentaries regarding connotative meaning. But to what extent does
the functional linguistic use of these expressions correspond to their etymology? This study
examines such colour-word expressions using authentic, naturally-occurring data drawn from
general reference corpora in English and Italian.

The corpus evidence turns theoretical linguistic description on its head. Those expressions
that are said to prove the existence of connotative meanings do nothing of the sort. In
communicative acts, they are chosen for their pragmatic value, not their compositional
semantic content, and display the unmistakable signs of delexicalisation. However,
connotative meaning does find its way into language in use: it abounds in the many and
various innovative expressions based upon those delexicalised canonical forms.

It is in translation that the full implications of delexicalisation and relexicalisation come to the
fore. The realisation that conventional language is essentially delexicalised encourages the
translator to work mainly with pragmatic, functional meaning. This prioritises the translation
of meaning over word-form, resulting in a more faithful transmission of semantic content
from one language to another.

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CONTENTS

0. INTRODUCTION.............................................................................................................................1
0.1 BACKGROUND.....................................................................................................................................1
0.2 THIS STUDY..........................................................................................................................................2

1. COLOUR MEANING IN ACADEMIC AND NON-ACADEMIC SOURCES............6
1.1 INTRODUCTION..................................................................................................................................6
1.2 COLOUR MEANING IN PHILOSOPHY, ÆSTHETICS AND ANTHROPOLOGY....................7
1.2.1 Colour Taxonomies: The Basic Colours.......................................................................................... 8
1.2.1.1 Berlin and Kay’s colour categories............................................................................................... 9
1.2.1.2 Criticism of the categories.............................................................................................................11
1.2.1.3 Colour naming and colour meaning..............................................................................................13
1.2.2 Colour Meaning In Philosophy And Æsthetics: The Categorisation Of Colours........................14
1.2.2.1 Colours and the elements...............................................................................................................16
1.2.2.2 Colours and the humours...............................................................................................................19
1.2.2.3 Other colour categories.................................................................................................................19
1.2.2.4 Discussion of colour categories.....................................................................................................20
1.2.3 Connotation And Symbolism............................................................................................................21
1.2.3.1 Black and white..............................................................................................................................22
1.2.3.2 Red.................................................................................................................................................23
1.2.3.3 Green and yellow...........................................................................................................................25
1.2.3.4 Blue................................................................................................................................................27
1.2.3.5 The remaining colours...................................................................................................................28
1.3 COLOUR MEANING AND SCIENCE.............................................................................................29
1.3.1 Synæsthesia........................................................................................................................................30
1.3.1.1 Kinds of synæsthesia......................................................................................................................30
1.3.1.1.1 Chromatic-graphemic synæsthesia...........................................................................................................31
1.3.1.1.2 Chromatic-lexical synæsthesia.................................................................................................................32
1.3.1.1.3 Other synæstheæ......................................................................................................................................32
1.3.1.2 Colour meaning for synæsthetes....................................................................................................32
1.3.2 Colour In Behavioural Psychology...................................................................................................33
1.4 OTHER VIEWS ON COLOUR..........................................................................................................35
1.4.1 Colour Consultancy...........................................................................................................................36
1.4.2 Chromotherapy..................................................................................................................................37
1.4.3 Colour Meaning In Popular Culture...............................................................................................38
1.4.3.1 Global Color Survey......................................................................................................................39
1.4.3.2 Journalism and colour meaning.....................................................................................................39
1.5 CONCLUSION.....................................................................................................................................41

2. FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE AND PHRASEOLOGY.......................................................43
2.1 INTRODUCTION................................................................................................................................43
2.2 LITERAL AND NON-LITERAL LANGUAGE...............................................................................44
2.2.1 Definitions Of Literal Language.......................................................................................................44
2.2.1.1 Word meaning................................................................................................................................45
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2.2.1.2 Prototypical meaning.....................................................................................................................47
2.2.1.3 Salient meaning..............................................................................................................................48
2.2.1.4 Pragmatic meaning........................................................................................................................49
2.2.2 Metaphor Terminology.....................................................................................................................51
2.2.2.1 Topics, vehicles, targets and sources.............................................................................................51
2.2.2.2 Transparency and opacity..............................................................................................................52
2.2.2.3 Living and dead metaphor.............................................................................................................53
2.2.2.3.1 Dead metaphor.........................................................................................................................................53
2.2.2.3.2 Living metaphor.......................................................................................................................................55
2.2.2.3.3 Commentary............................................................................................................................................57
2.2.3 Traditional Definitions Of Metaphor...............................................................................................57
2.2.3.1 The substitution view......................................................................................................................58
2.2.3.2 The comparison view.....................................................................................................................59
2.2.3.3 The class inclusion view.................................................................................................................60
2.2.4 The ‘Contemporary Theory Of Metaphor’.....................................................................................62
2.2.4.1 Origins of the theory......................................................................................................................62
2.2.4.2 Theoretical outline.........................................................................................................................63
2.2.4.3 Commentary...................................................................................................................................65
2.2.5 Other Important Categories Of Non-Literal Language.................................................................67
2.2.5.1 Idioms.............................................................................................................................................67
2.2.5.1.1 The standard definition of idiom..............................................................................................................67
2.2.5.1.2 Criteria for idiomaticity...........................................................................................................................69
2.2.5.1.3 Idiom schemas and variation to canonical forms.....................................................................................70
2.2.5.1.4 Compositional and non-compositional meaning......................................................................................72
2.2.5.2 Metonym.........................................................................................................................................73
2.2.5.2.1 Standard definition...................................................................................................................................73
2.2.5.2.2 Loose definitions of metonymy...............................................................................................................74
2.2.5.2.3 Metonymical motivation..........................................................................................................................75
2.3 UNDERSTANDING FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE: A PSYCHOLINGUISTIC VIEW................76
2.3.1 The ‘Direct-Access View’..................................................................................................................77
2.3.2 The ‘Graded Salience Hypothesis’...................................................................................................79
2.3.3 Suppression........................................................................................................................................82
2.3.4 Commentary.......................................................................................................................................84
2.4 CORPUS LINGUISTICS AND PHRASEOLOGY...........................................................................86
2.4.1 Contextual Meaning..........................................................................................................................88
2.4.1.1 Context of situation........................................................................................................................89
2.4.2 Phrasal Fixity And Variability.........................................................................................................90
2.4.2.1 Semantic preference.......................................................................................................................90
2.4.2.2 The idiom principle........................................................................................................................91
2.4.2.3 Semantic prosody...........................................................................................................................93
2.4.3 Delexicalisation..................................................................................................................................94
2.5 SUMMARY..........................................................................................................................................96

3. CORPUS LINGUISTICS AND LANGUAGE DATA.......................................................100
3.1 INTRODUCTION..............................................................................................................................100
3.2 WORKING WITH CORPORA........................................................................................................100
3.2.1 Searching Corpora..........................................................................................................................101
3.2.1.1 The KWIC concordance...............................................................................................................101
3.2.1.2 Word lists.....................................................................................................................................104
3.2.1.3 Lexical profiling...........................................................................................................................105
3.2.2 Data Mark-Up..................................................................................................................................107
3.2.2.1 Lemmatisation..............................................................................................................................107
3.2.2.2 Tagging........................................................................................................................................108
3.2.2.3 Mark-up tools used in this research.............................................................................................109
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3.3 CORPORA USED IN THIS STUDY................................................................................................110
3.3.1 Comparison Of The Bank Of English And CORIS: Composition..............................................110
3.3.2 Comparison Of The Bank Of English And CORIS: Software Tools And Access......................113
3.4 CORPUS ANALYSIS........................................................................................................................114
3.4.1 Data-Based Corpus Analysis..........................................................................................................114
3.4.1.1 Subtracting data...........................................................................................................................115
3.4.1.2 Overlooking data..........................................................................................................................116
3.4.1.3 Adding data..................................................................................................................................117
3.4.2 Data-Driven Corpus Analysis.........................................................................................................117
3.5 COLOUR WORD EXPRESSIONS: A DEFINITION OF THE DATA EXAMINED................120
3.5.1 Characteristics Of The Data...........................................................................................................121
3.5.1.1 Literal and prototypical colour-word expressions.......................................................................122
3.5.1.2 Figurative colour word expressions.............................................................................................123
3.5.1.3 Criteria for the inclusion of non-basic colours............................................................................124
3.5.1.4 Summary......................................................................................................................................124
3.5.2 Procedures For Retrieving Non-Canonical Variations Of Fixed Phrases In Corpora..............125
3.5.2.1 Case study 1: ‘like a red rag to a bull’/ ‘like a red flag before a bull’........................................127
3.5.2.2 Case study 2: ‘notte in bianco’....................................................................................................129
3.6 DISCUSSION.....................................................................................................................................131

4. COLOUR WORDS IN ENGLISH AND ITALIAN...........................................................133
4.1 INTRODUCTION..............................................................................................................................133
4.2 FREQUENCIES OF THE BASIC COLOUR TERMS IN ENGLISH AND ITALIAN..............134
4.2.1 Berlin And Kay’s Study..................................................................................................................134
4.2.2 Frequencies In The Bank Of English.............................................................................................135
4.2.3 Frequencies In CORIS....................................................................................................................137
4.2.4 Frequency And Meaning: Commentary........................................................................................140
4.3 COLOUR WORDS AND MEANINGS............................................................................................142
4.3.1 Literal And Prototypical Meaning.................................................................................................142
4.3.1.1 White/ bianco...............................................................................................................................143
4.3.1.2 Whiter than white.........................................................................................................................146
4.3.1.3 Red/ rosso.....................................................................................................................................148
4.4 FIGURATIVE MEANING IN COLOUR-WORD EXPRESSIONS.............................................151
4.4.1 Black, White, And Shades Of Grey................................................................................................153
4.4.1.1 Good and evil...............................................................................................................................153
4.4.1.1.1 The depths of despair.............................................................................................................................155
4.4.1.2 Written evidence...........................................................................................................................155
4.4.2 The True Colours.............................................................................................................................156
4.4.2.1 Red...............................................................................................................................................156
4.4.2.1.1 Passion and fervour................................................................................................................................156
4.4.2.1.2 Economic and bureaucratic difficulties..................................................................................................157
4.4.2.2 Green and yellow.........................................................................................................................158
4.4.2.2.1 Envy and jealousy..................................................................................................................................158
4.4.2.2.2 Youth.....................................................................................................................................................159
4.4.2.2.3 The natural world...................................................................................................................................159
4.4.2.2.4 Mysteries and unsavoury characters......................................................................................................160
4.4.2.3 Blue..............................................................................................................................................160
4.4.2.3.1 The sky above........................................................................................................................................160
4.4.2.3.2 The depths below...................................................................................................................................161
4.5 SUMMARY........................................................................................................................................162
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