Loading...Loading...

Causale constructies met kleuren : een bron van intensivering ? Een cross-linguïstische constructionele analyse in het Nederlands, het Engels en het Frans

Poncin, Fiona

(2021)

Details

Supervisors

Kristel Van Goethem

Faculty

Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres

Degree label

Master [120] en langues et lettres modernes, orientation germaniques, à finalité approfondie

Abstract

enPeople resort to creative ways of expressing their feelings; the use of colour terms is no exception. Previous research has shown that colours form an interesting domain of expression, especially through their associations with specific emotions which can arise via several cognitive processes. The cross-cultural nature of these associations, however, is disputable. This study aims to provide a cross-linguistic constructional analysis of the causal construction using colour adjectives (e.g. he is green with envy; she turned red with anger) in which such associations play a central role. Specifically, it investigates the degree of formal and semantic variation of this construction in three different languages, namely Dutch, English, and French. Moreover, an analysis of the productivity of this construction (Barðdal 2008) shows how it ties into the expression of intensification, as this study argues that the causal construction with colours allows for the expression of an extreme emotion or state, which was only briefly discussed in previous research. To test the hypothesis that the causal construction shows slight cross-linguistic differences while mostly allowing for an intensified reading, a corpus study was conducted using the TenTen web corpora on the Sketch Engine. Instances of the causal construction in the three investigated languages were coded for construction type, semantics and lexical fillers. Their overall productivity, as well as the productivity of each colour per emotion and each emotion per colour, was then calculated using the type-token ratio. The results show comparable productivity rates in the three languages, with more variation in the 'emotion' slot than in the 'colour' slot of the construction, but noticeable cross-linguistic differences in terms of the associations between colours and emotions. This study suggests that the causal construction using colour terms should be considered a language-specific instance of partially lexicalized intensification.