A touch of color: A linguistic analysis of the use of color terms in the language of tourism

In contemporary linguistics, color is an important area of investigation since it provides insights into human cognition and categorization of reality. Drawing on Berlin & Kay (1969) and the theories developed after their seminal work (MacLaury 1995, Wierzbicka 1996), this study aims at analyzing the evolution of color naming approaches across time and assessing the impact of color terms in their context of use, namely in the language of tourism, while bringing to the forefront the methodological difficulties behind a linguistic study of color terms based on corpus studies. The focus of the study is on describing language in use, in a contextual perspective and by means of a corpus-based analysis of such parameters as collocation, colligation, semantic preference and semantic prosody (Sinclair, 1991 and 1996). It also evidences cases of diachronical changes in semantic preference and suggests potential applications in the area of language learning and translation studies.