Colourful causal constructions: a source of intensification? A cross-linguistic constructional analysis in Dutch, English and French

People resort to creative ways of expressing their feelings; the use of colour terms is no exception. Previous research has shown that colours form an interesting domain of expression, especially through their associations with specific emotions which can arise via several cognitive processes (Soriano & Valenzuela 2009). The cross-cultural nature of these associations, however, is disputable. This study aims to provide a cross-linguistic constructional analysis (Boas 2010; Hoffmann & Trousdale 2013) of the causal construction using colour adjectives (e.g. he is green with envy; she turned red with anger) in which such associations play a central role (Sandford 2014). Specifically, it investigates the degree of formal and semantic variation of this construction in three different languages, namely Dutch, English, and French. Moreover, an analysis of the productivity of this construction (Barðdal 2008) shows how it ties into the expression of intensification, as this study argues that the causal construction with colours allows for the expression of an extreme emotion or state, which was only briefly discussed in previous research (De Knop 2013, 2014). To test the hypothesis that the causal construction shows slight cross-linguistic differences while mostly allowing for an intensified reading, a corpus study was conducted using the TenTen web corpora on the Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al. 2014). Instances of the causal construction in the three investigated languages were coded for construction type, semantics and lexical fillers. Their overall productivity, as well as the productivity of each colour per emotion and each emotion per colour, was then calculated using two different measures. The results show comparable productivity rates in the three languages, with more variation in the ‘emotion’ slot than in the ‘colour’ slot of the construction, but noticeable cross-linguistic differences in terms of the associations between colours and emotions. This study suggests that the causal construction using colour terms should be considered as a language-specific instance of partially lexicalized intensification. References Barðdal, J. (2008). Productivity. Evidence from Case and Argument Structure in Icelandic. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Boas, H. (Ed.) (2010). Contrastive Studies in Construction Grammar. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. De Knop, S. (2013). Eine Untersuchung von Kausalkonstruktionen mit Farbbezeichnungen im Rahmen der Konstruktionsgrammatik. In De Knop, S., Mollica, F. & Kuhn, J. (Eds.), Konstruktionsgrammatik und Romanische Sprachen, (pp. 111-136). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. De Knop, S. (2014). A contrastive study of colour terms in French and German causal constructions. In L. Filipović & M. Pütz (Eds.), Multilingual Cognition and Language Use: Processing and Typological Perspectives (pp. 73-96). Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Hoffmann, T. & Trousdale, G. (2013). The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kilgarriff, A., Baisa, V., Bušta, J., Jakubíček, M., Kovář, V., Michelfeit, J., Rychlý, P., & Suchomel, V. (2014). The Sketch Engine: ten years on. Lexicography, 1, 7-36. Sandford, J. L. (2014). Turn a colour with emotion: A linguistic construction of colour in English. Journal of the International Colour Association, 13, 67-83. Soriano, C., & Valenzuela, J. (2009). Emotion and colour across languages: Implicit associations in Spanish colour terms. Social Science Information, 48(3), 421-445. Verhagen, A. (2005). Constructiegrammatica en ‘usage based’ taalkunde. Nederlandse Taalkunde, 10(3/4), 197-221