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Journal Articles Linguistic Typology Year : 2021

Areal patterns and colexifications of colour terms in the languages of Africa

Abstract

Although colour terms are the semantic domain which has attracted the largest number of studies, notably from a typological point of view, searching the large online cross-linguistic lexical database of African languages (RefLex, Segerer & Flavier 2011-2019) pointed out several previously undetected areal colexification patterns and shared lexico-constructional patterns in a genetically balanced sample of 401 languages spoken Africa. In this paper, we illustrate several areal characteristics of colours terms along three scenarios: (i) the spread of an areal feature due to a common extra-linguistic setting (locust bean-Parkia biglobosaas the lexical source of YELLOW); (ii) two convergence phenomena, one based on a shared lexico-constructional pattern including a term for WATER, and one based on shared colexifications (RED and RIPE vs. GREEN and UNRIPE); and (iii) an areal pattern of lexical diffusion of colour ideophones, a category which was considered difficult to borrow.
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Dates and versions

halshs-03483348 , version 1 (16-12-2021)

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Guillaume Segerer, Martine Vanhove. Areal patterns and colexifications of colour terms in the languages of Africa. Linguistic Typology, 2021, ⟨10.1515/lingty-2021-2085⟩. ⟨halshs-03483348⟩
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