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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
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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

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References

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