Title Conceptualizing color in english and dutch: a semantic tree analysis of lexical items /
Translation of Title Spalvų konceptualizavimas anglų ir olandų kalbose: semantinė leksinių vienetų analizė.
Authors Bakaitė, Giedrė
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Pages 50
Keywords [eng] Cognitive linguistics, color semantics, polysemy, radial category networks, semantic extension, metaphor and metonymy, collocation analysis, Sketch Engine, color terminology, kognityvinė lingvistika, spalvų semantika, polisemija, radialinės kategorijų struktūros, semantinė plėtra, metafora ir metonimija, kolokacijų analizė, Sketch Engine, spalvų terminologija
Abstract [eng] This thesis investigates the semantic divergences and extensions of five basic color adjectives—black/zwart, white/wit, red/rood, blue/blauw, and green/groen—in English and Dutch. Grounded in the theoretical framework of Cognitive Linguistics and drawing on the principles of lexical semantics, the study explores how these color terms extend metaphorically and metonymically across the two languages, offering insight into both shared and language-specific conceptualizations of color. The analysis draws on two large-scale web corpora accessed via Sketch Engine: the English Web 2021 corpus (enTenTen21, ~52.3 billion words) and the Dutch Web 2020 corpus (nlTenTen20, ~5.9 billion words). Collocational behavior was examined in two syntactic environments—adjective-noun modification and predicative constructions (be + adjective)—selected for their productivity in revealing semantic salience. For each color term, the top 100 collocates were extracted based on logDice scores, which favor strongly associated and informative word combinations. A random sample of 50 concordance lines per collocate was then manually analyzed to identify instances of literal, metonymic, or metaphorical usage. The findings suggest that while both English and Dutch color terms show systematic patterns of semantic extension, English adjectives more frequently exhibit abstract and metaphorical usages, such as in emotional or evaluative domains (e.g. blue mood, black humor), whereas Dutch tends to favor more concrete, metonymically grounded associations. These results provide nuanced insights into the polysemous structures of color concepts and contribute to our understanding of how closely related languages map meaning within radial semantic networks.
Dissertation Institution Vilniaus universitetas.
Type Master thesis
Language English
Publication date 2025