Colour terms in EEBOWhat colour terms are used when in the EEBO texts? How do frequencies change? What words accompany colour terms?

Things to consider:● what are colour terms and how do we find them?● spelling variation● inflected forms● polysemy and other forms of ambiguity● relative frequencies

Things that help:● http://cqpweb.lancs.ac.uk/● Wordclass annotation● Semantic annotation● Search, concordance, collocation, distribution, downloads● Variant spellings in OED

Ylva Berglund Prytz, Sam Cottrell, @harryharrold, Martin Wynne

Colour terms

Because color exhibits both biological and linguistic aspects, it has become a deeply studied domain that addresses the relationship between language and thought.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_color_naming_debate)

Today every natural language that has words for colors is considered to have from two to twelve basic color terms. All other colors are considered by most speakers of that language to be variants of these basic color terms. English contains eleven basic color terms: "black", "white", "red", "green", "yellow", "blue", "brown", "orange", "pink", "purple", and "gray".

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term)

Methodology

Two datasets:● All words tagged as part of the semantic field 'colour',

with 'year of publication' metadata● For the colours of the rainbow, all occurrences for all

variant spellings (from the OED) tagged as adjectives

In addition:● For selected words, find all statistically significant

noun collocations

Words of caution

● Not entirely sure what's in the dataset at cqpweb.lancs.ac.uk (44000 texts?)

● Semantic tagging not 100% accurate (and never will be)

● Wordclass tagging not 100% accurate● Difficult to visualize the larger datasets

110473 white 87210 colour 73728 black 57386 red 47111 dyed 41917 green 41173 shadow 34275 bright 33939 golden 26418 colours 23263 yellow 17112 pale 15346 Golden 14986 Colours 13665 shadows 13570 Colour 13493 Black 13413 brightness 13038 purple 12060 Red 11021 dim 10685 ag 9807 coloured 9509 stain 8632 Green 7636 darkened 7033 stripes 7019 shade 6791 gray

61633 red

1820 sed

399 redder

197 reid

116 reddest

71 redest

17 readest

16 ried

9 riddest

7 rodest

6 ryddest

3 rydest

3 roder

3 roddest

2 seddest

2 ryid

2 raddest

1 ruddest

1 rottest

1 ridest

1 readdest