This chapter first describes the corpus of poems used, viz. the 93 poems in the collection by Davies and Maud (1988), comprising all that Thomas himself wished to preserve and chose to include in his Collected Poems 1934–1952, plus two poems which had been dropped from the 1952 collection. We then go on to discuss the classification of colour terms, using the system provided by Biggam (The Semantics of Colour. Cambridge University Press, 2015), which is based on Berlin and Kay’s (Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. University of California Press, 1969) postulation of basic colour terms (BCTs) in a language, which encode a set of 11 putatively universal basic colour categories. They claim that a language can name between two and all 11 of these categories, and that the order in which they appear is always the same. Although Berlin and Kay’s work has been subject to criticism and modification, their suggestions for the identification of the basic colour words in a language by means of largely linguistic criteria has proved useful and forms the basis for Biggam’s account. The chapter gives a brief account of these criteria, particularly important among which are that a BCT should be monolexemic (e.g. green rather than moss green) and that it should not be a hyponym of another term shown to be basic (e.g. scarlet is not a BCT because it is a hyponym of red). Biggam divides BCTs into primary and secondary types, the primary ones being those identified by the German physiologist Ewald Hering as consisting of three opposed pairs which he proposed were operative in colour vision: black/white, red/green and blue/yellow. All other BCTs are secondary. Cross-cutting this typology is the opposition between terms denoting chromatic colours, defined as those having a hue, and those relating to achromatic colours, which have no hue. We also make a distinction, in our work, between colour word, used to refer to any single lexical item which denotes a particular colour, such as green, white, red, emerald or crimson, and colour term, used for any single or multiple word unit which is used in the text to label a colour. The next section presents a classification of the types of entity described by the colour terms, distinguishing, for example, between entities in the natural world and in the man-made world, with more detailed categories within each of these major divisions. Finally we show how the data on each occurrence of a colour term were recorded in an Excel spreadsheet.

Corpus of Poems and Methodology

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发表日期：

2025年

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Christopher Butler,
Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen

摘要

This chapter first describes the corpus of poems used, viz. the 93 poems in the collection by Davies and Maud (1988), comprising all that Thomas himself wished to preserve and chose to include in his Collected Poems 1934–1952, plus two poems which had been dropped from the 1952 collection. We then go on to discuss the classification of colour terms, using the system provided by Biggam (The Semantics of Colour. Cambridge University Press, 2015), which is based on Berlin and Kay’s (Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. University of California Press, 1969) postulation of basic colour terms (BCTs) in a language, which encode a set of 11 putatively universal basic colour categories. They claim that a language can name between two and all 11 of these categories, and that the order in which they appear is always the same. Although Berlin and Kay’s work has been subject to criticism and modification, their suggestions for the identification of the basic colour words in a language by means of largely linguistic criteria has proved useful and forms the basis for Biggam’s account. The chapter gives a brief account of these criteria, particularly important among which are that a BCT should be monolexemic (e.g. green rather than moss green) and that it should not be a hyponym of another term shown to be basic (e.g. scarlet is not a BCT because it is a hyponym of red). Biggam divides BCTs into primary and secondary types, the primary ones being those identified by the German physiologist Ewald Hering as consisting of three opposed pairs which he proposed were operative in colour vision: black/white, red/green and blue/yellow. All other BCTs are secondary. Cross-cutting this typology is the opposition between terms denoting chromatic colours, defined as those having a hue, and those relating to achromatic colours, which have no hue. We also make a distinction, in our work, between colour word, used to refer to any single lexical item which denotes a particular colour, such as green, white, red, emerald or crimson, and colour term, used for any single or multiple word unit which is used in the text to label a colour. The next section presents a classification of the types of entity described by the colour terms, distinguishing, for example, between entities in the natural world and in the man-made world, with more detailed categories within each of these major divisions. Finally we show how the data on each occurrence of a colour term were recorded in an Excel spreadsheet.