Color and emotions in English

This paper presents a corpus study of collocational patterns of English color and emotion words. A collection of 50 color terms and 135 emotion terms served as the starting point for the search of patterns. The obtained patterns are described and analysed with regard to salience from two different points of view: For each emotion category we ask which color categories are most salient, and for each color category we ask which emotion categories are most salient. The analysis of the underlying motivation for salient color-emotion collocations demonstrates that the commonest motivations are based in metaphorical models linked to the body. This indicates the importance of experiential and embodied models for creating associations involving color terms.