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Colour adjectives or colour nouns?

par De Brabanter, Philippe ;Sharifzadeh, Saghie
Référence 44th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE 44) (8-11 Sept. 2015: Logroño, Spain)
Publication Non publié, 2011-09-11

Communication à un colloque

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Résumé :

Colour adjectives or colour nouns?This paper presents partial results of corpus research into colour terms. Our focus here is on lexical-class membership. Colour terms are known to be either adjectives or nouns. But there may be cases where they have too easily been classified as adjectives.When a phrase headed by a colour term (or a colour compound) occurs in predicative position, this colour term is sometimes unequivocally a noun, witness the indefinite article:1) BNC B7G The motorcycle was a bright red. It belonged to the Post Office.These alternate with articleless occurrences:2) BNC BP1 […] touching the reeds with golden fingers so that they were bright yellow.In 2), nothing in principle rules out the (uncountable) noun analysis. However, we have found few occurrences of articleless bright/dark/light/pale colour in predicative position in the BNC, a finding which supports the adjectival reading.But it is striking that when bright/dark/light/pale appear in the comparative form in predicative colour phrases, as in3) BNC B0K The coat is red-and-white pied and the Brandrood variety is a darker red,the colour phrase is almost systematically preceded by the indefinite article.This reveals some association between comparative modifier and nominal colour term. We believe this association extends to the attributive position as well.It is usually assumed that strings like are compound adjectives (Bauer & Huddleston 2002: 1658; Conti 2007: 134). But there are four possible readings of a phrase like a very dark green room:1. A room that is both very dark and green: a [very dark] [green] room2. A green room that is very dark: a [very dark] [green room]3. A room that is dark green to a high degree: a [very [dark green]] room4. A room that is a very dark green: a [[very dark] green] roomIn 1 and 2, both dark and green are adjectives. More interesting are 3 and 4, where very dark green forms a constituent. In 3, dark green is a compound. In 4, the nominal paraphrase and the fact that very dark can hardly be an adverb phrase suggest that green is most likely a noun. It is this last claim in particular that needs further substantiation. We will therefore explore two patterns that potentially favour a nominal reading of the colour term: multiple premodification (e.g. rich dark green), and attributive colour phrases modified by comparative brighter/darker/lighter/paler (e.g. a darker green blouse) – which preclude adjectival compounds (as those are always internally uninflected).ReferencesBauer, Laurie & Huddleston, Rodney (2002) Lexical word-formation. In The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. CUP, 1621–1721.Conti, Sara (2007) Compound Adjectives in English. A descriptive approach to their morphology and functions. PhD dissertation. Universita di Pisa.Steinvall, Anders (2002) English Colour Terms in Context. PhD dissertation. Umea University.