ATYPICAL COLOUR TERMS IN POLISH LANGUAGE: GENERAL REVIEW

Abstract

The article is devoted to the general review of atypical (non-standard, specific) Polish colour terms and selected, most common colour groups which belong to this category. The concept of “atypicality” of such lexemes was considered in detail, and the corresponding definition was proposed. It was found that atypical colour terms are lexemes which designate colours and are not fixed by dictionaries or infrequent. They form an interesting and under-researched lexical layer. The boundaries of this group are sufficiently blurred because there are no clear criteria for assigning lexemes to typical or atypical – quite often this is subjective. Our investigation is based on the data from the survey which was carried out on the social network “Facebook” by the community “Poprawna polszczyzna” on August 27, 2018. The analysis showed that some of the most common are pejorative names of colour (14,4%) which include vulgarisms and non-normative lexemes. Semantically undefined colour terms were also very popular among respondents. It was the second most frequent group (10,8%). A relatively large group (8,3%) represents the lexemes indicating skin tone. Correlation of pejorative colour terms was observed, and euphemisms which substitute for them were considered. Attention was also paid to the evaluative function of colour terms which was very important for some respondents. Children’s neologisms which denote colours have also been noted.