The colourful causal construction. A corpus-based cross-linguistic analysis of its form and function in Dutch, English and French

Abstract

Previous research has shown that colours are used in many languages to express emotions. This study aims to provide a cross-linguistic constructional analysis of the Colourful Causal Construction (CCC) (e.g., she is red with anger) in which colour-emotion associations play a central role. A corpus study was conducted using the TenTen web corpora to investigate the formal variation and the lexical-semantic features of this construction in Dutch, English and French, as well as its productivity and potential for intensification. Results show that the CCC fits a similar semi-schematic pattern in the three languages under study. All three languages share the same top three of lexical fillers in the colour slot, namely red, green and white, and the construction expresses a literal/metonymic meaning in approximately 50% of the cases across the three investigated languages. Some colour-emotion associations are shared and used with similar frequencies in all three languages (e.g., red with shame, rood van schaamte, rouge de honte), but striking language-specific preferences also exist (e.g., red with rage, rood van woede vs. vert de rage). In terms of productivity, some colours (e.g., red) impose few semantic restrictions on the emotion-nouns they combine with and hence correlate with a relatively high number of emotion-nouns, while others are only found in fixed collocations (e.g., blue with cold). Moreover, the study suggests that the CCC should be considered a language-specific means of (partially) lexicalized intensification.