Del Viva, Maria M. and Mariani, Ilaria and De Caro, Carmen and Paramei, Galina V. (2022) Florence “blues” are clothed in triple basic terms. i-Perception, 13 (5). ISSN 2041-6695
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Abstract
Psycholinguistic studies provide evidence that Italian has more than one basic color term (BCT) for “blue”: consensually, blu denotes “dark blue,” while “light-and-medium blue,” with diatopic variation, is termed either azzurro or celeste. For Tuscan speakers (predominantly from Florence), the BLUE area is argued to linguistically differentiate between azzurro “medium blue” and celeste “light blue.” We scrutinized “basicness” of the three terms. Participants (N=31; university students/graduates born in Tuscany) named each chip of eight Munsell charts encompassing the BLUE area (5BG-5PB; N=237) using an unconstrained color-naming method. They then indicated
the “best exemplar” (focal color) of blu, azzurro and celeste. We found that frequencies of the three terms and of term derivatives were comparable. Referential meaning of blu, azzurro, and celeste was estimated in CIELAB space as L∗a∗b∗-coordinates of the mean of focal colors and as “modal” categories, that is, dispersion around the mean. The three “blue” terms were distinct on both measures and separated along all three CIELAB dimensions but predominantly along the L∗-dimension.
Our results provide evidence that Tuscan speakers require all three terms for naming the BLUE area, categorically refined along the lightness dimension. Furthermore, celeste appears to be athird BCT for “blue,” along with commonly considered BCTs azzurro and blu. The “triple blues”
as BCTs for Tuscan speakers are in contrast with outcomes of two “blue” basic terms estimated by using the same methodology in two other locations in Italy—azzurro and blu (Verona, Veneto region) or celeste and blu (Alghero, Sardinia).
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Additional Information and Comments: | Creative Commons CC BY: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). |
| Keywords: | Italian blue basic terms, Florence, Tuscany, BLUE area color naming, CIELAB |
| Faculty / Department: | Faculty of Human and Digital Sciences > School of Psychology |
| Depositing User: | Matthew Adams |
| Date Deposited: | 10 Oct 2022 14:21 |
| Last Modified: | 10 Oct 2022 14:21 |
| URI: | https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/3641 |
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