Author: Christina Markou
The Democritus University of Thrace in Komotini
Published in Slavyanski dialozi, XX, 2023, 32.
Abstract: The modern people’s tendency to differentiate and detail the color relations encoded in languages is connected with the development of expanded color categorization system, taking into account the basic color parameters as hue, brightness and saturation. In this comparative study we will focus on an understudied aspect of the relationship between color and language: on the means of grading qualitative and quantitative color features and expressing graded color values that are available in Bulgarian Modern Greek. The specific morphological, syntactic and lexical modifiers modeling the color characteristics expressed by the hyperonymic color terms are considered: intensifying and deintensifying affixes, adjectival and adverbial modifiers, elative, attenuative and approximative constructions, etc. No less important task is to study the semantic characteristics of the secondary hyponymic color terms. One of the goals of the study is to consider the degree of interlanguage structural and semantic asymmetry.
Key words: color terms, gradation, Bulgarian, Modern Greek, morpho-semantic aspects