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

Le résumé fourni par la source

Abstract Of all the semantic domains, colour terms have attracted the largest amount of attention, notably from a typological point of view. However, there is much more to be discovered. A search of the cross-linguistic lexical database of African languages (RefLex) reveals several previously undetected areal colexification patterns and shared lexico-constructional patterns in a genetically balanced sample of 401 languages. In this paper, we illustrate several areal characteristics of colour terms: (i) the spread of an areal feature due to a common extra-linguistic setting (locust bean –Parkia biglobosa – as the lexical source ofyellow); (ii) two convergence phenomena, one based on a shared lexico-constructional pattern including a term forwater, and one based on shared colexifications (redandripevs.greenandunripe); and (iii) an areal pattern of lexical diffusion of colour ideophones, a category which has thus far been considered difficult to borrow.

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