Linguistic construal of colors: The case of Russian

The paper provides a specific approach to the semantics of color, which differs from the most widespread “psycholinguistic” account – in that it privileges linguistic behavior of color terms. The main object of this investigation is linguistic combinability of color-term adjectives with regards to nouns of “colored” objects. We argue that coexistence of two or more color terms related to the same physical fragment of the color gamut, but whose use is motivated by the need for denoting colors of either natural or artifact objects, is one of the basic grounds for systemic variability in the term meaning.