COGNITIVE MECHANISMS AND STRUCTURAL PATTERNS OF ENGLISH COLOR-BASED NEOLOGISMS (FROM THE 1980s TO THE PRESENT)

Abstract

The study delves into English color-based neologisms from the 1980s to the present, with a particular focus on the underlying cognitive mechanisms (metaphor and metonymy) and word-formation patterns. The most common color-based neologisms were identified using neologism trackers, while the NOW (New on the Web) corpus of English and Google Ngram Viewer were additionally applied to trace their emergence and relative frequency at present. Our findings indicate that political and social developments are the primary drivers of new color-based coinages, with green, blue, red, and gray being the most productive color terms in English neology. In terms of structure, most of the neologisms under study are noun phrases of the ADJ + N type, followed by compounds and blends in frequency. The study explores how the traditional color symbolism (e.g., green as the color of nature, blue as the color of water) is perpetuated and further reinforced in new words and phrases (most notably in the environmental discourse), while also identifying new connotations color terms have acquired over the last decades as a result of economic and social development (e.g., orange as the color of cryptocurrency, purple as the color of women’s rights and LGBTQ+). These findings illustrate a dynamic evolution in which historical symbolism remains embedded as new layers of meaning unfold. Diachronic shifts in metaphoric extensions of color terms and the role of digital communication in shaping their new connotations warrant further research, which could benefit from corpus-based approaches.