Hostname: page-component-84b7d79bbc-dwq4g Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-28T15:20:31.346Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The terms brun and marron in modern standard French

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Isabel Forbes
Isabel Forbes
Affiliation:
Université de Paris III
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

My main purpose here is to examine the basic colour vocabulary of modern standard French in the light of recent research on colour vocabularies and in particular to account for the fact that two highly salient terms, brun and marron, are used to designate a single colour category which I shall call BROWN. (The notion of saliency is defined in § 1.2 below.) Before the publication in 1969 of Berlin and Kay's Basic color terms with its universalist hypothesis, the fact that the English term brown has no one equivalent term in French would generally have been regarded as evidence for the structuralist view that languages are anisomorphic in their semantic structures (Lyons, 1968). Linguists before 1969 turned to colour vocabularies to demonstrate not only that languages are anisomorphic in their semantic structures but that the colour continuum is cut up in a completely arbitrary way in different languages (Hjelmslev, 1943; Gleason, 1955). Recent research, however, suggests that some modification of this view may be necessary.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , September 1979 , pp. 295 - 305
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1979

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Berlin, B. & Berlin, E. A. (1975). Aguaruna color categories. American ethnologist 2. 61–87.Google Scholar
Berlin, B. & Kay, P. (1969). Basic color terms; their universality and evolution. Berkeley/ Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Coseriu, E. (1964). Pour une sémantique diachronique structurale. TLL 11.Google Scholar
Dictionnaire des fréquences (1971). I, Table alphabétique (4 vols); IV, Table de repartition des homographes. Paris: Didier.Google Scholar
Dougherty, J. W. D. (1975). A universalist analysis of variation and change in color semantics. Ph.D. Thesis, University of California, Berkeley.Google Scholar
Forbes, I. (1976). Structural semantics with particular reference to the vocabulary of colour in Modern Standard French. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Edinburgh.Google Scholar
Gleason, H. (1955). An introduction to descriptive linguistics. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.Google Scholar
Hage, P. & Hawkes, K. (1976). Binumerian color categories. Ethnology 14. 287–300.Google Scholar
Hjelmslev, L. (1943). Omkring sprogteoriens grundlaeggelse. Whitfield, F. J. (trans.), Proleogomena to a theory of language. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Kay, P. (1975). Synchronic variability and diachronic change in basic colour terms. LiS 4. 257–270.Google Scholar
Lyons, J. (1968). Introduction to theoretical linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Snow, D. L. (1971). Samoan colour terminology: a note on the universality and evolutionary ordering of color terms. AnL 13.Google Scholar
Trésor de la langue française, vols 1–4 (1971–1975). Paris: Editions du CNRS.Google Scholar