Ukrainian Colour Concepts for Blue

A much-studied area, colour categorization has received renewed attention in cognitive linguistics. A promising line of research is the reconstruction of colour concepts. Specifically, the goal is to discover points of reference used by a linguistic community for different colours. The colour system of Ukrainian is special in that it has as many as three basic words (synij, blakytnyj and holubyj) for what is generally called blue in English. This paper analyzes experimental and corpus data and offers a reconstruction of their referential models. The Ukrainian colour names under study are shown to have a dominant reference point (a clear sky for all three words) and secondary ones. Relevant aspects of typical observation situations and other contributing factors are discussed.