A corpus-based study of patterns and uses of English colour terms : a case study of the adjectives black, white, and red

Abstract

Color terms in English have been explored in semantics (e.g. Berlin and Kay 1969, Leech 1981, Wyler 1992, Allan 2009). However, these studies, particularly Wyler (1992) and Allan (2009), rely on intuition-based data. This research applies corpus linguistics, using authentic, naturally-occurring data drawn from the British National Corpus (BNC) to explore lexicogrammatical patterns and uses of the three English colour term adjectives-black, white and red. These three adjectives are found to occur within the list of 100 most frequently-used adjectives in the BNC, representing contemporary British English. The use of corpus data in this research reveals two significant findings. That is, (1) the pragmatic meanings or discourse prosodies of the colour terms are realized as a result of their co-occurrences with other words, not quite because the color terms have their own distinctively connotative properties. In other words, the pragmatic meanings of the colour terms are the properties of the phrases, not each single word of the colour terms; (2) these pragmatic meanings or discourse prosodies are not restricted to the figurative use of the colour terms, but also extend to the non-figurative category which, as a matter of fact, constitute a substantial part of findings in this research.