The Sense of Color. A Cognitive Linguistics analysis of color words in English

“The Sense of Color” describes the semantics of ‘seeing and color’ words for color aficionados and illustrates how Cognitive Linguistics may be used to analyze a linguistic frame for those who are interested in linguistics. While discussing English specifically, each Chapter, titled with a basic color term, stresses specific information about the linguistics of the color in relation to the others, and treats an aspect of embodiment, cognitive operations, and conceptualization of COLOR/SEEING terms. The text proposes a model of the process of conceptualizing the visual sensation, and how we elaborate the input through patterns of experience to express meanings. The model specifies the primary conceptual metaphors and metonymies with a complex that works together to structure our usage of color/seeing terms in natural language. It includes COLOR as a source domain as in SEEING IS COLOR, as a target domain as in COLOR IS A LOCATION or AN OBJECT, and color metonymy: COLOR ATTRIBUTE IS ACCESS FOR COLOR ENTITY.