When Color Becomes Metaphor: A Diachronic Corpus Study of Semantic Extension in Four English Color Adjectives

Abstract

This study examines the metaphorical extension of four English color adjectives: golden, dark, green, and red. The historical change was analyzed in the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) (1820-2010), and contemporary register distribution in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) (1990-2019). Frequency data, Mutual Information (MI)-based noun collocates, semantic coding, keyword-in-context (KWIC), and register comparison are used to seek for the historical change and the contemporary register distribution. The collocate results are not the same for the four adjectives. Golden contains more metaphorical collocates than the other items, whereas green has the largest literal category. The historical frequencies of individual collocations also vary within the same adjective. Red tape, red flag, and red carpet become common during different periods, while dark side and dark matter gain frequency at different times. KWIC analysis of four collocations produced different conventionalization levels. All examples of golden age were classified as metaphorical when compared with 97.5% for red tape, 82.5% for dark side, and 35% for green light. The register results also differ among the four adjectives. Golden is most frequent in the news register, whereas dark, green, and red reach their highest frequencies in the fiction register. The KWIC results and register frequencies do not produce the same ordering of the four adjectives. The findings show that metaphorical extension, conventionalization, and register distribution do not develop uniformly across English color adjectives.