Semotics of Colour -

http://www.iass-ais.org/proceedings2014/view_lesson.php?id=69

Useful quotes:

'Umberto Eco (1985) defines colour as a cultural unit, which means that as a sign it combines both the individual and the social.'

'Miroslav Dachev (1997) used the cultural unit of Eco in introducing his reflections on colour in Bulgarian symbolist poetry of the late 19th and early 20th century in a monograph. Dachev introduces the concept of coloureme '

'Kress & van Leeuwen (2002) deal with the visual colour by analyzing the colour speech and visual rhetoric, but not colour language. They achieve results within the adopted methodology of systemic linguistics'

'colour is multifunctional in terms of Halliday (1978; 1993) with ideational, interpersonal, textual functions.'

'Kress & van Leeuwen recognize that there are two ways to produce meaning of colours. The first is psychological – by associations that come from the culture and the past, but also from present current advertising and brands.'

'The second way is to accept the visual qualities of colour – hue, saturation, purity, modulation, differentiation – as semantic distinguishing features. They are placed within the ideational, interpersonal and textual functions.'

'we are faced with colour idiolects, dialects, with national and regional languages of colour. Thus, we enter by the physical properties of colour, once – in the territory of natural language, and secondly – into the social and individual culture and tastes.'

'van Leeuwen declares that ‘looking at colour as a semiotic resource not only means looking at colour technologies, it also means looking at the way colour meanings are developed.’ (2011: 2). '

'(Almalech 2001; 2011):

– One and the same colour can have opposite meanings. I call this intra-colour antonymy.

– Many colours can mean the same feeling or idea. This is the inter-colour synonymy.

– Both effects are due to the small number of tokens in the colour language – visual and verbal'

'Semioticians are dealing with the translation of colours. Kourdis (in print) speaks of intersemiotic translation between language and colour in advertisements. Leone (2009) presents a semiotic interpretation of the art of Marc Chagall on Moses while receiving from God the Tablets of the Law. He indicates how the visual colour matches the biblical text.'

'Wierzbicka (1990) presents a scheme, which combines the evolutionary sequence, the prototype theory, the macro-catagories and the fuzzy sets. Her understanding is that prototypes are natural objects, rather than Rosch’s salient colour areas. Wierzbicka points to specific objects: red – blood and fire; white – light; black – darkness, night; blue – sea and sky; green – all plants; yellow – the sun at noon'

'Borg surveys the colour categorization and colour terminology among the Negev Bedouin (1999) and the colour usage in the modern Arabic colloquials (2007). He uses the macro-colour categories to demonstrate the richness of colour expressions that stand outside the set of basic colour terms. '

'The presence of a red veil, red and white clothes, bouquet (green) and gold in all traditional weddings through the ages – regardless of religion, the type of social order and technological level – is a universal four-syntagmatic encoding of the traditional wedding. (Almalech 1996)'

'Physical and spiritual purity has been a universal signified of white for centuries across many cultures. With the same lexical meaning, purity, white is used at funerals – in Ancient Greece, in modern Japan, etc'