Linguistic mechanisms of colour term evolution

Abstract

We investigated diachrony of distributional semantics of two competing Russian colour terms (cts) for ‘brown’, buryj (11th century) and koričnevyj (17th century), using the Russian subcorpus of Google Books Ngram (2020). Time-series analysis (1800–2019) of bigrams gauged each term’s frequencies of occurrence and changes in combinability with nouns for natural objects, artefacts, abstract concepts and figurative expressions. In frequency, koričnevyj overtook buryj in the 1920s, confirming its basic status in modern Russian. The perplexity index indicates that koričnevyj steadily increased the range of denoted objects, with artefacts being front runners in the buryj-to-koričnevyj transition. The results corroborate Rakhilina’s (2007a, 2007b, 2008) hypothesis that an incipient ct initially collocates with nouns denoting artefacts but gradually expands to the realm of natural objects supplanting an old ct. Moreover, koričnevyj and buryj are discerned by denotations and connotations. The present findings provide insights into general mechanisms of the linguistic evolution of an emergent basic ct.