O campo semántico das cores visto por tres xeracións

• Main Author: María Dolores Villanueva Gesteira
• Format: Article
• Language: Catalan
• Published: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela 2009-01-01
• Series: Estudos de Linguistica Galega
• Online Access: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=305626315017

It is widely held that named colour categories in the world’s languages are organized around universal focal colours, or prototypes. This paper examines this semantic fi eld in Galician oral use. We chose fi ve Galician-speaking families in the villages of Xesteira and Almofrei that had members pertaining to three generations. Twenty two interviews were carried out and provide the lexical material discussed in this study, which thus attempts to present the colour categories in a Galician micro-community, track linguistic changes and document their semantic consequences. As the younger generations move towards greater lexical homogeneity, they show a preference for terms learned at school over the words they heard at their grandmother’s knee, and establish more clearcut categories along the colour continuum. Spanish language contact has contaminated the colour lexicon with Castilian forms or new meanings for inherited terms. We document the route followed by words through three generations, the disuse into which some forms have fallen and the recovery of others as a consequence of bringing Galician into the school curriculum.