Seeing through dictionaries: On defining basic colour terms in English, Japanese and Polish lexicography

It seems that despite the undeniable fact that colour research has received considerable attention for centuries1 resulting in more than 3000 publications during the last 150 years (MacLaury 1997 after Steinvall 2002), there still exists a niche to be filled. There has been no or very little research regarding colour terms conducted from the viewpoint of (meta)lexicography2. The present study is meant to evaluate existing dictionary definitions of Basic Colour Terms3 (henceforth BCTs) from the colour lexicon of English, Japanese and Polish in order to detect any doubtful content which could be improved to equip the dictionary user with richer, more adequate information regarding the colour lexicon. The immediate aims of the study are to determine: 1) what definition types are used to define CTs 2) what prototypes extensional definitions point to when defining BCTs and how these relate to the data obtained from naive native speakers of the languages in question. To this end, two empirical investigations were conducted. The first one is devoted to dictionary definitions, while the second one is an experiment carried out among naive native speakers of the three languages