Areal patterns and colexifications of colour terms in the languages of Africa
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Guillaume Segerer
und
Martine Vanhove
Abstract
Of all the semantic domains, colour terms have attracted the largest amount of attention, notably from a typological point of view. However, there is much more to be discovered. A search of the cross-linguistic lexical database of African languages (RefLex) reveals several previously undetected areal colexification patterns and shared lexico-constructional patterns in a genetically balanced sample of 401 languages. In this paper, we illustrate several areal characteristics of colour terms: (i) the spread of an areal feature due to a common extra-linguistic setting (locust bean – Parkia biglobosa – as the lexical source of yellow); (ii) two convergence phenomena, one based on a shared lexico-constructional pattern including a term for water, and one based on shared colexifications (red and ripe vs. green and unripe); and (iii) an areal pattern of lexical diffusion of colour ideophones, a category which has thus far been considered difficult to borrow.
Acknowledgments
We are indebted to our colleagues who provided us with data on their language(s) of expertise: Odette Ambouroué, Pascal Boyeldieu, Mark Dingemanse, Dmitry Idiatov, Rozenn Guérois, Konstantin Pozdniakov, Nicolas Quint, Serge Sagna, Yvonne Treis, Mark Van de Velde, Alexandra Vydrina†, and to Abbie Hantgan-Sonko for having checked our English. Our special thanks also go to the two anonymous reviewers, and to the editors of this special issue of Linguistic Typology for their helpful comments. Of course, as usual, all remaining errors are ours.
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†Deceased.
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Research funding: We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of our research unit, the LLACAN, the ANR project RefLex (https://sites.google.com/site/referencelexicon/home/presentation-en), and the CNRS Fédération Typologie et Universaux Linguistiques (http://www.typologie.cnrs.fr/). This work was also partially supported by a public grant overseen by the French National Research Agency (ANR) as part of the program “Investissements d’Avenir” (reference: ANR-10-LABX-0083). It contributes to the IdEx Université de Paris – ANR-18-IDEX-0001.
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© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Introduction to special issue on areal typology of lexico-semantics
- Kinship terminologies reveal ancient contact zone in the Hindu Kush
- Areal patterns and colexifications of colour terms in the languages of Africa
- How a West African language becomes North African, and vice versa
- Baring the bones: the lexico-semantic association of bone with strength in Melanesia and the study of colexification
- Red, black, and white hearts: ‘heart’, ‘liver’, and ‘lungs’ in typological and areal perspective
- Sitting and talking together: packaging meaning into verbs with the neighbors
- Patterns of persistence and diffusibility in the European lexicon
- Universal and macro-areal patterns in the lexicon
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Introduction to special issue on areal typology of lexico-semantics
- Kinship terminologies reveal ancient contact zone in the Hindu Kush
- Areal patterns and colexifications of colour terms in the languages of Africa
- How a West African language becomes North African, and vice versa
- Baring the bones: the lexico-semantic association of bone with strength in Melanesia and the study of colexification
- Red, black, and white hearts: ‘heart’, ‘liver’, and ‘lungs’ in typological and areal perspective
- Sitting and talking together: packaging meaning into verbs with the neighbors
- Patterns of persistence and diffusibility in the European lexicon
- Universal and macro-areal patterns in the lexicon
