Part of
Colour Studies: A broad spectrumEdited by Wendy Anderson, Carole P. Biggam, Carole Hough and Christian Kay
[Not in series 191] 2014
► pp. 140–152
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
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
2023. COLOUR NAMING: SEMANTICS OF THE COLOUR WHITE IN ENGLISH AND POLISH LEXICON. Lege artis. Language yesterday, today, tomorrow ► pp. 147 ff. 
O’Meara, Carolyn & Asifa Majid
2020. Anger stinks in Seri: Olfactory metaphor in a lesser-described language. Cognitive Linguistics 31:3 ► pp. 367 ff.
Alexander, Marc & Christian Kay
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