View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by AMS Acta 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 ii To M&D, M&B, and Ame and to ENEL, who made the end so memorable iii iv 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. v vi 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. vii 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 viii 2.2.1.2 Prototypical meaning..................................................................................................................... 47 2.2.1.3