Del Viva, Maria M. and Castellotti, Serena and Paramei, Galina V. (2023) The Italian colour lexicon in Tuscany: elicited lists, cognitive salience, and semantic maps of colour terms. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 10. ISSN 2662-9992
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Abstract
e investigated the Tuscan Italian colour inventory, with the aim of establishing the cognitive salience of the basic colour terms (BCTs) and most frequent non-BCTs. Native
speakers from Tuscany (N = 89) completed a colour-term elicitation task lasting for 5 min. In total, 337 unique terms were elicited, with an average list length of 30.06. The frequency of each term, its mean list position and cognitive salience index (S) were calculated. The CTs with the highest S (ranked 1–13) included 10 counterparts of the Berlin and Kay BCTs listed in their 1969 seminal work and three basic ‘blue’ terms, blu, azzurro, celeste, estimated for Tuscan respondents by Del Viva et al. in 2022. S-index and Zipf-function (the terms’“popularity”) indicated that fucsia (rank 14) is conceivably an emerging BCT in (Tuscan) Italian. Other cognitively salient non-BCTs are lilla, magenta, ocra and beige. The terms’ 3D semantic map (conceptual closeness), assessed using multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis, revealed that in the lists, closely associated CTs were arranged along three competing criteria: the term’s salience gradient; word length; and clustering of fully chromatic concepts with those defined primarily by lightness or desaturation. We also consider salient Italian non-BCTs as indicators of the ongoing process of lexical refinement in certain areas of the colour space. In conclusion, measures of elicitation productivity, as well as the augmented BCT inventory, including the Tuscan ‘triple blues’, and abundant hyponyms and derived forms all indicate (Tuscan) Italian speakers’ “cultural competence” in the colour domain and the need to communicate nuanced information about colour shades.
| Item Type: | Article |
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| Additional Information and Comments: | © The Author(s) 2023. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. |
| Faculty / Department: | Faculty of Human and Digital Sciences > School of Psychology |
| Depositing User: | Matthew Adams |
| Date Deposited: | 04 Dec 2023 13:23 |
| Last Modified: | 04 Dec 2023 13:23 |
| URI: | https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/4087 |
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