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In:Progress in Colour Studies: Colour Expression and Cognition
Edited by Carole P. Biggam, Domicele Jonauskaite, Mari Uusküla and Dimitris Mylonas
[Not in series 244] 2026
► pp. 15–28

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Lightly filling the air with colour

A construction analysis [WITH *COLOUR]

 | University of Perugia
Published online: 20 February 2026
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https://doi.org/10.1075/z.244.02san
Abstract
How do we structure the conceptual nature of language and our experience of colour? I discuss one of the ways in which we do this through the construction [WITH *COLOUR]. With is one of the three most frequent prepositions used with colour terms, as is evident from the Corpus of Contemporary American English. The sense elaboration of this construction stems from conceptual metaphors such as COLOURS are possessions / accompaniment / instruments. This paper presents the construction and proposes a description of the statistically significant embodied patterns English speakers use in its conceptualisation. It considers how image schemas and conceptual metaphors combine to reflect the different senses of with and proposes a mapping of the corpus data.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical approach
  • 3.Usage of colour construction [WITH *COLOUR]: A corpus analysis
  • 4.Construction conceptualisation and conclusions
  • 5.Conceptual mapping of the sense variation in the construction
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (24)
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