In:Colour Studies: A broad spectrum
Edited by Wendy Anderson, Carole P. Biggam, Carole Hough and Christian Kay
[Not in series 191] 2014
► pp. 140–152
A metaphorical spectrum
Surveying colour terms in English
Published online: 26 November 2014
https://doi.org/10.1075/z.191.09and
https://doi.org/10.1075/z.191.09and
This chapter investigates the figurative use of a selection of colour words in the Historical Thesaurus of English, published as the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (Kay et al. 2009) and containing the recorded vocabulary of the language from Old English to the present. The adopted methodology slightly adapts that of the AHRC-funded Mapping Metaphor project, which is examining the distribution of metaphors across time in English through an investigation of metaphorical links between concepts signalled by areas of significant lexical overlap between Thesaurus categories. In this chapter, we empirically examine metaphorical and other relationships between colour and a range of other semantic categories, through the examples of the colour terms black, white, blue, yellow and green.
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Cited by (3)
Cited by three other publications
Uberman, Agnieszka
O’Meara, Carolyn & Asifa Majid
Alexander, Marc & Christian Kay
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