LINGUIST List 12.2392

Wed Sep 26 2001

Qs: Business Women's Lang, Color Connotation Words

Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Veronika Koller, language of business women
2. Marianna Katsoyannou, Color concepts

Dear list members,
does anyone know what (if any) linguistic research has been done on the
language of business women?

I appreciate your help and will of course post a summary.

Best regards,
Veronika Koller
Mag.a Veronika Koller
Department of English/Business English
Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration
Augasse 9
A-1090 Vienna
Tel.: 43/1/31336-4068
Fax: 43/1/31336-747

In the context of a research on child language we are looking for words 
with strong single-color connotations, to evoke the color concepts by 
association upon reading the words. The colors we are interested in are 
red, green, blue, yellow, and brown.
The restriction is that these words should be normally known to 12 year 
olds but not very frequent in the written lexicon. The requirement for 
low frequency may be somewhat at odds with the requirement for strong 
color association, so the low frequency requirement may be considered 
secondary, or only relative to higher-frequency words that also have 
strong color associations.
As an example, if "lemon" is a prototypically yellow thing, we might 
prefer "canary" in that it is presumably quite yellow conceptually but 
(again, presumably) less frequent. Note that we are not interested in 
the association from the color word to this word (e.g., 
"yellow->canary"), but in the opposite direction ("canary->yellow").
A further constraint is that this is for an experiment in Greek, in 
which we don't have relevant association or frequency norms. We are 
hoping to get some help from other languages that might help direct our 
search or provide specific cases that may be carried over to the Greek 
language.
Thank you in advance for your help,

Athanassios Protopapas protopapilsp.gr
Marianne Katsoyannou mariannailsp.gr
Institute for Language and Speech Processing
Artemidos 6 & Epidaurou, 15125 Maroussi
Phone: +301-6875300 Fax: +301-6854270