Turn a colour with emotion: a linguistic construction of colour in English

Abstract

What colour-emotion associations are entrenched in English colour constructions? Colour term constructions have evolved from predicative descriptors (the sky is blue) to cover nominal (blue is beautiful - the sky is a beautiful blue), actional (the sky reddened), and adverbial functions (the sky went/turned/became/grew red). The conventional unit pairing of meaning with form leads us from a mental representation to a lexical concept that is then associated with a construction. The objective of this paper is to analyse the complex predicative metonymic basic colour term construction X (CHANGE) Y with Z, which is an expanded metaphorical construction of X (BE) Y with Z, as in He went/turned white with fear. In this study two different usage-based methods have been employed to verify what colour terms are associated with specific emotions. The first method was a corpus analysis conducted using the Corpus of American English and the Corpus of Historical American English. The second method involved three questionnaire tests (106 informants). Results show that associating a colour to a given emotion made for greater consensus, than the other way around. This research argues that the relationship of colour-emotion constructions are well entrenched for English speakers. They are conceptualised through metaphor and metonymy that have roots in embodied physical and psychological experiences. Priming these constructions is accessed more directly via emotion, though the colour-emotion association varies according to contextual constraints.