The chapter presents a linguistic analysis of the referential meanings in the semasiological structure of basic and non-basic color terms in a specific usage situation such as marketing. Although most linguistic studies share the assumption about the central role of the reference-related aspects in understanding the semantic structure of color words, the methods for accessing and operationalizing this type of meaning remain rather limited. We propose that a usage-based bottom-up analysis of referentially-enriched multimodal data can provide additional possibilities for modeling the semantics of basic and non-basic color terms. The analysis focuses on the referential range of individual color terms as a basis for identifying different types of color terms used in online marketing and discusses the implications for the semantic relations between color terms based on their referential overlap.

No abstract

In the article we explore the length of color terms used in advertising as one of the formal parameters of their lexical complexity. We report two case studies applying multiple linear regression to test the variation in the color term length relative to two sets of sociolinguistic parameters relevant for online marketing and purchase. The first case study reveals the most general variation patterns in four product categories (cars, clothing, women's makeup, house paints) involving the effects of such sociolinguistic factors as product category and the status of the brand. In the second case study, we propose a more fine-grained analysis of the product category of cars focusing on the product-specific sociolinguistic parameters (type of car, year of production, country of the parent company) and their interactions with the more general variables revealed by the first analysis.

The chapter contains linguistic analysis of a sample of 100 catalogue entries written for three American museums to describe individual paintings. The aim of the study is to investigate the use of color words by art critics and painters in American English. Results of the analysis indicate an extensive use of nominalization in the color lexicon of discourse studied – along with attributive function of color words, which perform as modifiers of nouns and signal color as a property of an entity. Notably, both basic and non-basic color terms tend to be used as nouns. The nominalized color words exhibit the full range of morphological, semantic, and syntactic features of nouns. We suggest that this kind of verbalization of color concepts in painting descriptions reflects a certain model of understanding color as a domain of human experience, in particular, categorizing color as a thing-like manipulable entity.

The paper explores language-internal variation in the referential meaning of the lexical form blue. Taking a usage-based cognitive approach, we analyze the referential range of blue in several marketing contexts from a semasiological and an onomasiological perspective. The study develops an interdisciplinary method that combines frequency analysis with mapping of the referent distributions in the three-dimensional CIELab color space. It is argued that the observed referential variation in blue is influenced by usage-related factors such as availability of the referents, diversity of color naming strategies and onomasiological competition between lexical forms in the individual product categories.