Turn a color with emotion

Basic color terms (i.e., BLACK, WHITE, RED, YELLOW, GREEN, BLUE) represent a semantic frame that is defined through our embodiment of vision. Color terms are polysemic and take on positive or negative connotations depending on how they are conceived in the object/surround association. Each basic color term has one or more associations with an emotion. The question posed is: What color-emotion associations are entrenched in English color constructions? Color term constructions have evolved from predicative descriptors (The sky is blue.) to cover nominal (Blue is beautiful. The sky is a beautiful blue.), actional (The sky reddened.), and adverbial functions (The sky went/turned/became/grew red.). The conventional unit pairing of meaning with form leads us from a mental representation to a lexical concept that is then associated with a construction. The objective of this paper is to analyze the complex predicative metonymic basic color term construction X (CHANGE) Y with Z, which is an expanded metaphorical construction of X (be) Y with Z, as in He went/turned white with fear. CHANGE IS MOTION is the underlying conceptual metaphor that marks a shift from a still concept image (be) to dynamic concept image (go/turn) – known as summary scanning and sequential scanning –. The accompaniment role of with Z, as in X go Y with Z, allows for the shift from John went home with Mary to John went green with envy. In this case X is the person-subject, Y is a color term, and Z is the emotion that is conventionally associated through our embodied experience. The conceptual metaphor-metonym expressed by the BCT changes according to the individual frame triggered by each construction. In this study two different usage-based methods have been employed to verify what color terms are associated with specific emotions. The first method was a corpus analysis conducted with the Corpus of American English, and the second was made up of three psycholinguistic tests. One test asked participants to respond to the question What emotion comes to mind with colors?” Black with ……… etc. and one asking They turned [color] with ………, both tests involved the eleven basic color terms The third test question was turned around asking for a color, instead of an emotion, “I went/turned ……… with [emotion]”, e.g., with fear, envy, etc.. This test included the fourteen most common emotions that emerged from the corpus analysis and the first two tests. Results showed that having a given emotion made for greater consensus in color-emotion association, rather than when the color was given and the participants had to access an emotion. This research argues that the relationship of color-emotion constructions are definitely well entrenched for English speaker’s. They are conceptualized through metaphor and metonymy that have roots in embodied physical and psychological experiences. Priming these constructions is accessed more directly via emotion, though it varies according to contextual constraints, e.g., ANGER was associated with eight different colors.