=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-3608/paper24
|storemode=property
|title=A statistical profile of color terms in Irving Stone’s biographical novel about Vincent van Gogh: a corpus-based approach
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3608/paper24.pdf
|volume=Vol-3608
|authors=Olena Levchenko,Oksana Levytska,Marianna Dilai
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/scia2/LevchenkoLD23
}}
==A statistical profile of color terms in Irving Stone’s biographical novel about Vincent van Gogh: a corpus-based approach==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3608/paper24.pdf
A Statistical Profile of Color Terms in Irving Stone’s Biographical
Novel about Vincent Van Gogh: a Corpus-Based Approach
Olena Levchenko 1, Oksana Levytska 1,2,3 and Marianna Dilai 1
1
Lviv Polytechnic National University, S. Bandera st. 12, Lviv, 79013, Ukraine
2
Ukrainian Academy of Printing, Pid Holoskom st. 19, Lviv, 79020, Ukraine
3
Shevchenko Institute of Literature, M. Hrushevskoho st. 4, Kyiv, 01001, Ukraine
Abstract
The paper presents the use of corpus-based methods to investigate color terms in fiction. On
the basis of Irving Stone’s biographical novel about the post-impressionist painter Vincent van
Gogh, Lust for Life (1934), which established the genre of fictionalized biographies, a
comprehensive analysis of color terms has been carried out, and a statistical profile of color
terms has been developed.
Corpus-based research allows for the identification and analysis of the frequency of use of
lexemes and their collocations, etc., including the distribution of the frequency of color terms
in the text of the novel, distributional analysis, and the study of the valence of color terms.
For the research, the capabilities of the Sketch Engine software were used. A subcorpus of the
text of the novel Lust for Life was created, based on which a list of color terms was compiled,
the frequency of color terms and their shades was found, and the distribution of frequency of
use throughout the novel was determined. The results of the study are illustrated with tables,
diagrams, and reproductions of the artist. The characteristic features of using color terms in the
text are analyzed, and the patterns of color terms coinage by the writer in comparison with the
color palette of the artist’s paintings are revealed.
Keywords 1
Corpus-based analysis, collocate, color terms, frequency, fictionalized biographies.
1. Introduction
Colors are a professional tool for artists, their biographical fiction writers, and art scholars. This tool
is complex, and multifaceted, and requires separate research on color terms. The study of artistic
biographical prose about painters yields more effective results when using interdisciplinary approaches,
incorporating methodologies from various fields, including the application of corpus technologies.
Corpus-based studies of color terms are currently employed in applied and cognitive linguistics, literary
studies, and are the subject of comparative and intermedial studies [1; 2; 3]. Within the field of corpus
linguistics, color terms are also actively studied based on texts belonging to various styles and genres
[4; 5]. Furthermore, they are viewed in contrastive [6; 7] and translation studies [8; 9].
Digital technologies are constantly evolving and actively used for the analysis of works of art. For
example, in 2019, the results of a study on the use of the CIELab color space for analyzing the colors
in Van Gogh’s oil paintings were published. The main goal of the study was to propose a simple and
fast method for analyzing colors in paintings, this research “is motivated by the idea that image and
color science could reasonably analyze the color used in an artwork” [10; 2]. “This study used a novel
method, which is identifying the color distribution of oil paintings through color volume analysis” [10;
7]. Researchers analyzed 370 oil paintings regarding their color distribution: “The right side of Figure
SCIA-2023: 2nd International Workshop on Social Communication and Information Activity in Digital Humanities, November 9, 2023, Lviv,
Ukraine
EMAIL: levchenko.olena@gmail.com (O. Levchenko); oksana.s.levytska@lpnu.ua (O. Levytska); mariannadilai@gmail.com (M. Dilai);
ORCID: 0000-0002-7395-3772 (O. Levchenko); 0000-0002-5033-4661 (O. Levytska); 0000-0001-5182-9220 (M. Dilai)
© 2023 Copyright for this paper by its authors.
Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)
CEUR
ceur-ws.org
Workshop ISSN 1613-0073
Proceedings
1 shows the color gamut of VG’s oil paintings. Many colors used in his paintings, such as light blue,
light orange, yellow, light red, brown, cyan, teal, light gray, and dark gray, were compared to the left
side of Figure 1, which shows the typical color gamut base on the CIEL*a*b* color space. The figure
also shows that purple, pure red, and pure green were hardly used in his paintings” [10; 5].
Figure 1: Sample of color distribution at CIEL*a*b* color space (bird’s view).
The aim of this article is to explore the potential application of corpus methods to analyze
biographical texts about painters, analyze the peculiarities of using color terms in such works, identify
patterns in the creation of color terms by the writer in comparison with the color palette of the artist’s
canvases, and develop a statistical profile of color terms in the analyzed text.
The research material is the biographical novel by American writer Irving Stone about Dutch painter
Vincent van Gogh [11]. This choice is motivated by several reasons:
1. Irving Stone is considered the founder of the genre of a biographical novel about artists. His
first novel, Lust for Life, based on the biography of van Gogh, was published in 1934 after numerous
rejections by publishers. However, it later gained widespread popularity, was translated into many
languages (including Ukrainian in 2020), and laid the foundation for the genre of a biographical
novel. Stone himself delivered a lecture on writing novels about artists;
2. Vincent van Gogh, the post-impressionist painter, is one of the most famous and influential
colorists. In his oil, pastel, and watercolor works, he employed a rich palette of pure colors, semi-
tones, and nuanced shades. Van Gogh discovered color gradually, experimenting with hues and
contemplating the role of colors in painting. His canvases are studied in all art history courses;
3. The colors in van Gogh’s paintings capture the attention of researchers from various fields:
art history, literary studies, linguistics and translation studies, printing technology, restoration,
IT technology, psychology, and more. The application of interdisciplinary methods for research can
yield qualitatively new insights and findings;
4. Other biographical writers, for instance, V. Domontovych, when writing about van Gogh, also
highlighted color terms, described his paintings, and carefully selected words to denote shades. This
is also characteristic of screenwriters and directors who have worked on cinematic adaptations of
the artist’s biography;
5. To date, there are no similar corpus-based studies on color terms based on Irving Stone’s
biographical novel and the works of the artist. Therefore, we assume that the research methodology
could be used for the analysis of other texts, and the prospects of enriching language corpora with
novels about artists will significantly expand the language palette of color terms.
2. Corpus-based analysis in the study of color terms in biographical text
Corpus-based analysis, as repeatedly highlighted by researchers such as C. Meyer [13], David
Temperley and Leigh VanHandel [14], P. Baker [15], M. Paquot and L. Plonsky [16], D. Glynn [17],
and others, enables avoiding subjective judgments and conclusions since the findings are supported by
quantitative data. Additionally, corpus tools facilitate distributional and valency analyses of words,
which is especially significant for the research on color terms; searching for prototypical ideas about
color reproduced by the author of the text, in particular, those of the artists whose biographical works
we are investigating.
A focus subcorpus of the text of the novel Lust for Life (201,305 tokens) was created in the Sketch
Engine. To determine the frequency of color terms, a preliminary list of 56 color terms was compiled.
The text of the novel features 23 color terms with different frequencies, see Table 1.
Table 1
The frequency of color terms in the text of Irving Stone’s novel Lust for Life
Color Number of hits per million tokens
black 864,36
yellow 457,02
blue 457,02
white 407,34
red 387,47
green 312,96
grey 109,29
brown 104,32
orange 74,51
violet 69,55
lemon 64,58
pink 24,84
purple 14,90
crimson 14,90
scarlet 14,90
azure 9,94
ultramarine 9,94
beige 4,97
gamboge 4,97
indigo 4,97
lavender 4,97
pearl 4,97
terra sienna 4,97
In addition, the words colour and tone are of a high frequency in the text, Table 2, which is logical
and consistent with the thematic focus of the novel.
Table 2
The frequency of use of the lexeme colour and its coreferents in the text of Irving Stone’s novel Lust
for Life
Color Number of hits per million COCA
tokens
colour 685,53 4,83
tone 144,06 34,07
shade 74,51 13,94
hue 4,97 3,26
It is interesting to compare the obtained results with the data presented by N. Zaslavsky, Ch. Kemp,
N. Tishby, T. Regier [18] taken from the American English dataset, Figure 2, as well as with the data
from the COCA, Table 3.
Figure 2: Frequencies of the 11 basic color terms in English from the Google n-gram.
The actual sequence of color terms on the frequency list is distinctive. In the studied novel, the color
term black is of the highest frequency, and in the corpora used for comparison it surpasses the lexeme
white (in Stone’s novel, it is fourth); yellow and blue are second and third in frequency of use in the text
of the novel Lust for Life, but according to N. Zaslavsky, Ch. Kemp, N. Tishby, T. Regier, and the
COCA, they are fifth and seventh, respectively [18].
Table 3
The comparative table of color terms frequencies
Color Stone 2019 Cognitive COCA
Number of hits Neuropsychology Number of hits
per million tokens per million tokens
black 864,36 1 2 2 312,03
yellow 457,02 2 5 5 112,68
blue 457,02 3 7 7 44,06
white 407,34 4 1 1 371,67
red 387,47 5 3 3 170,92
green 312,96 6 4 4 129,28
gray / grey 109,29 7 8 11 11,27
brown 104,32 8 6 6 108,82
orange 74,51 9 9 8 38,17
violet 69,55 10 – 12 5,79
pink 24,84 11 – 9 32,79
purple 14,9 12 11 10 16,54
Figure 3: The frequency of color terms in the text of Irving Stone's novel Lust for Life
Figure 4 shows that the color term black is of the highest frequency in the studied novel.
Figure 4: Distribution of hits in the corpus black
It is important to note that the high frequency of the color term black in the initial chapters of the
analyzed text is its characteristic feature and can be explained by the chronological presentation of the
artist’s biography and iconography in Stone’s novel. While working as a missionary in a Belgian mining
town, van Gogh saw a lot of black around: mines, miners, their outfit, skin, and their way of life almost
devoid of daylight and color.
The artist wrote extensively about it in his letters and depicted it in dark tones in his paintings and
drawings. Consequently, the writer accurately conveyed it in the novel through color references. In
these chapters, black is intentionally dense. Below we provide a few quotes from Stone and
reproductions (Figure 5–6) of van Gogh’s works to illustrate it:
“Although Marcasse was only one of a string of seven mines owned by the Charbonnages Belgique,
it was the oldest and most dangerous pit in the Borinage. <...> The tall chimneys, which once had been
of yellow brick, spread tangible, black smoke over the neighbourhood twenty-four hours a day. Around
Marcasse were poor miners’ huts with a few dead trees, black from the smoke, thorn hedges, dunghills,
ash dumps, heaps of useless coal, and towering above it all, the black mountain. It was a gloomy spot;
at first sight everything looked dreary and desolate to Vincent. “No wonder they call it the black
country,” he murmured” [11; 47].
Figure 5: Van Gogh. Miners, 1880 Figure 6: Van Gogh. Miners Women Carrying
Sacks (The Bearers of the Burden), 1881
“The pickers worked in coarse linen suits, filthy and black. The shoveller was usually a young boy,
stark naked except fora burlap loin-cloth, his body a dull black, and the miner pushing the car through
the three foot passageway was always a girl, as black as the men, with a coarse dress covering the
upper part of her body. Water was leaking through the roofs of the cells, forming a grotto of stalactites.
The only light was from the small lamps whose wicks were turned down low to save fuel. There was no
ventilation. The airwas thick with coal-dust. The natural heat of the earth bathed the miners in rivulets
of black perspiration. In the first cells Vincent saw that the men could work standing erect with their
picks, but as he advanced down the passageway, the cells became smaller and smaller until the miners
had to lie on the ground and swing their picks from the elbow. As the hours went on, the bodily heat of
the miners raised the temperature of the cells, and the coal- dust thickened in the air until the men were
gasping great mouthfuls of hot, black soot” [11; 62].
The author of the novel notes that the artist paints using charcoal (29, 81). The diagram in Figure 4
shows that the author uses the color black throughout the novel, with the exception of a few chapters,
but its context changes: at the end of the novel, black is no longer used to describe people but rather
coffee, velvet, stone, hair, eyes, coat, jacket, dress, etc., which can be easily tracked using corpus
analysis methods.
The frequency of the color term brown (104.32) is comparatively high in the novel, including its
shades: reddish brown (4.97 per million), curly brown (4.97 per million), deep brown (4.97 per million),
dark reddish brown (4.97 per million), light brown (4.97 per million).
Following the descending order of color terms frequencies in the novel, the next ones are yellow,
blue, and their shades (for yellow: lemon, gold, etc.; for blue: ultramarine, azure, indigo, lavender).
These color terms are significantly more frequent in the second part of the novel (see Figure 7).
Figure 7: Distribution of hits in the corpus yellow
Figures 4 and 7 show that the distribution of the use of the color terms black and yellow is distinctive:
black dominates in the initial parts of the text, while yellow dominates in the final parts. Throughout two-
thirds of the novel, yellow appears rarely and with low frequency. The author seems to prefer shades of
this color rather than pure color; yellow is used to describe the artist’s hair, sand, the waters of the Thames,
paper, the sun, leaves, cheese, a lamp, and more, for example: “Both sides of the ward were lined with
beds sloping downward at an angle of five degrees, each surrounded by a framework on which were hung
dirty cream-coloured curtains” [11, 245]), and bright-yellow or lemon-yellow appear in the work in Arles,
where the artist came in search of light for creativity and most fully manifested his talent as a colourist.
The beginning of the chapter has a bright color characteristic: “The Arlesian sun smote Vincent between
the eyes, and broke him wide open. It was a whorling, liquid ball of lemon-yellow fire, shooting across a
hard blue sky and filling the air with blinding light. The terrific heat and intense clarity of the air created
a new and unfamiliar world” [11, 270].
Concerning the shades of yellow, the following were found in the novel: lemon-yellow (29.81 per
mln); sulphur-yellow (14.9 per mln); dirty yellow (4.97 per mln); dark yellow (4.97 per mln); very
yellow (4.97 per mln); golden-yellow (4.97 per mln); yellow-red (4.97 per mln), etc. In both van Gogh’s
works and Stone’s text, yellow becomes an accent color: “As the summer advanced, everything became
burnt up. He saw about him nothing but old gold, bronze and copper, covered by a greenish azure sky
of blanched heat. There was sulphur-yellow on everything the sunlight hit. His canvases were masses
of bright burning yellow. He knew that yellow had not been used in European painting since the
Renaissance, but that did not deter him. The yellow pigment oozed out of the tubes onto the canvas, and
there it stayed. His pictures were sun steeped, sun burnt, tanned with the burning sun and swept with
air” [11, 377].
The most frequent collocation is yellow house (35), which is the house of his dreams, where the
artist wanted to create a home for like-minded artists.
Figure 8: Van Gogh. Wheatfield with a Figure 9: Van Gogh. Self- Figure 10: Van Gogh. The
reaper, 1889 Portrait, 1887 Yellow House, 1888
As already mentioned, one of the key colors in the text of the novel is blue (Figure 11).
Figure 11: Distribution of hits in the corpus blue
In the text of the novel, we encounter a variety of shades of blue (Table 4). There are examples of
individual authorial comparisons: “Vincent gaped at the woman in utter bewilderment. She was young,
but not a child. Her eyes were as blue as the cobalt sky of an Arlesian night, and her hair, which she
wore in a great flowing mass down her back, was as lemon-yellow as the sun” [11, 397].
Table 4
The frequency of use of the shades of blue
Collocate Freq MI. log_f
prussian 4 23,07237
deep 3 9,79516
crying 2 11,547
dark 2 6,64778
forget-me-not 1 7,69079
pain-shot 1 7,69079
woof 1 7,69079
royal 1 7,69079
vacant 1 6,30449
glorious 1 5,74488
cobalt 1 5,61135
dull 1 5,49356
profound 1 5,3882
fade 1 5,3882
intense 1 5,05173
delicate 1 4,74635
pale 1 4,64627
dirty 1 4,43269
light 2 5,34655
hard 1 3,42811
The frequency of the use of the color term white is relatively balanced in the text of the novel,
Figure 12.
Figure 12: Distribution of hits in the corpus white
The frequency of the color term red and the names of shades of red is relatively high in the text of
the novel (Figure 13): “Her colouring was burnt gold, her teeth, between the smiling lips, as white as
an oleander seen through a blood-red vine” [11, 397]; “The burning lemon-yellow of the sun, the blood-
red of the soil, the crying whiteness of the lone cloud over Montmajour, the ever reborn rose of the
orchards...” [11; 372].
Figure 12: Distribution of hits in the corpus red
In 2020, a Ukrainian translation of the novel by Anna Markhovska was published [12]. The use of
corpus-based methods of analysis of color terms on the material of the original text and translations
also provides data for comparative conclusions and can be the subject of new research. For example, in
the course of the study, we found that the frequency of the color term red in the translation is much
lower than in the original, it is 290.05 per million tokens, while in the original it is 387.47 per million,
which could be explained by the difference in the semantics of English red and Ukrainian червоний,
see Table 5.
Table 5
Comparative table of the original and the translation (color term red)
Head 1 Irving Stone’s original text Translation into Ukrainian by Anna
Markhovska
hair He snatched up a comb, tried to Він схопив гребінець, намагаючись
straighten out the tangle of wavy red розчесати сплутане руде волосся,
hair, took Caesar de Cock’s picture from взяв зі столу картину Цезаря де
the table, and flung open the door. Кока й відчинив двері.
Her hair was neither the corn blond nor На відміну від інших тамтешніх
the raw red of her country-women, but жінок, волосся її було не пшенично-
a curious intermingling, in which the білявим чи яскраво-рудим. У ньому
fire of one had caught up the light of прецікаво поєдналися ці кольори:
the other in a glowing, subtle warmth. полум’я одного відтінку зливалося
із сяйвом іншого, утворюючи м’яке
тепло.
beard Vincent leaned against the carriage, Вінсент притулився до екіпажа;
rivulets from his red hair streaming вода струмочками стікала з його
down his face. рудого волосся на обличчя.
His eyes were just two black pin pricks, Очі його нагадували дві чорні
his cheeks had been sucked in, the шпильки, щоки запали, кістки під
circular bones under his eyes protruded, очима виступали, а обличчя
a dirty, red beard matted his face. прикривала брудна руда борода.
He was unwashed and unkempt, his Вінсент був невмитий і неохайний,
coarse, red beard splashed all over his його жорстка руда борода
face and neck. вкривала все обличчя й шию.
fire They sat on the floor, warmed by the Вони сиділи на долівці, зігріті
red glow of the stove, entwined in each багряним жаром плити, обвивши
other’s arms. одне одного руками.
sun The sun was setting red behind the pine Багряне сонце опускалося за сосни,
trees, the evening sky was reflected in вечірнє небо відбивалося у
the pools, and the heath and yellow ставках, а кольори пустища й
sand were full of harmony. жовтого піску гармонійно
поєднувалися.
The sun was just setting red over the Багряне сонце сідало над полем,
fields and the peasants were trudging землероби змореною ходою
their weary way home. верталися додому.
soil Behind the saplings, behind the За молодими деревцями, за
brownish red soil was a very delicate червонясто-брунатною землею
sky, bluish grey, warm, hardly blue, all було дуже ніжне небо: сіро-голубе,
aglow. тепле, ледь блакитне, повністю
осяйне.
3. Using color terms analysis to study the stylistics and poetics of fictionalized
biographies
Biographers and art historians have devoted numerous studies to explaining how van Gogh
discovered color and how it influenced his palette, themes, subjects, and technique. Stone writes: “He
quickly learned that a colorist is one who, seeing a color in nature, knows at once how to analyze it
and say. «That grey-green is yellow with black, and hardly any blue” [11, 230].
Anna Kwiatkowska has analyzed the poetics of impressionism in Stone’s work [21, 22], and in her
essay "Narration in Lust for Life" she also draws attention to the importance of color and chiaroscuro
in Stone’s novel and their lexical manifestations: “The narrator of Lust for Life is aware of the
significance of chiaroscuro, i.e. the distribution of light and shade. This awareness is thus duly
demonstrated on the lexical level. The colour-related vocabulary is employed by him on a large scale.
The colour palette enchants just like the paintings by van Gogh do. Additionally, the palette changes
continuously in harmony with the changes of tones in the painter’s works <...>. Gradually the colour
palette of the artist brightens and so does the verbal palette of Irving Stone: it is enriched with primitive
reds, greens, hues of blue and glaring yellows <...>. There are more and more of light, clear colours
even in the descriptions of the pictures that are to express sadness <...>. The colour of narration,
correspondingly to the colour on the canvas, develops into an effective method for expressing the most
profound feelings, individual reactions and most private opinions and views of the artist, both the
painter and the hero <...>” [21, 5]. The researcher also concludes that “the change of the verbal palette
of Irving Stone not only corresponds with the change of the painter’s palette but also renders the
emotional transformations of the painter” [21, 6].
In this study, we focus on the color terms that reflect the painting experiments in the novel. The
results of the quantitative analysis of color terms show that Stone’s text demonstrates sensitivity to van
Gogh’s color palette, the writer professionally describes the names of paints, pigments, etc. that are
important for the artist’s work:
“As soon as his allowance arrived from Theo — who had arranged to send fifty francs on the first,
tenth, and twentieth — he would rush down to the dealer and buy large tubes of ochre, cobalt, and
Prussion blue, and smaller tubes of Naples yellow, terra sienna, ultramarine, and gamboge. Then he
would work happily until the paints and the francs were exhausted, usually five or six days after the
allowance arrived from Paris, and his troubles set in again” [11, 230].
The author often resorts to the ekphrastic description of the artist’s paintings, focusing more on color
than on imagery or plot:
“A Zouave lad with a small face, the neck of a bull, and the eye of a tiger agreed to sit for a small
sum. Vincent did a half length of him in his blue uniform, the blue of enamelled saucepans, with a
braid of a faded reddish orange, and two pale lemon stars on his breast. There was a reddish cap on
the bronzed, feline head, set against a green background. The result was a savage combination of
incongruous tones, very harsh, common and even loud, but fitting the character of the subject” [11,
406].
I. Stone’s novel was written in the 1930s, when van Gogh’s letters went out of print, and interest in
his works grew significantly. At that time, the strategies of writing a biography about artists, which was
founded by I. Stone, were focused on the detailed study of biographical facts, documents, artworks,
memoirs, catalogs, and albums. The biographer worked with original works or reproductions in albums.
Modern digital technologies allow both authors of biographical works and researchers to group research
objects according to various criteria. For example, reproductions can be grouped by genre, chronology,
size, technique, and, importantly for our study, by color.
For example, filtering van Gogh’s works on the Van Gogh Museum website allows us to illustrate
and confirm our findings based on corpus lexical studies of the text of the biographical novel, Figure 14-
15.
Figure 14: Paintings by Van Gogh in 1885. A screenshot from the Van Gogh Museum website
This method will help to highlight the shades of color, to see certain characteristic features, and to
develop a methodology of analysis. Thus, in modern conditions, it will provide a toolkit for fiction
writers, film scriptwriters, etc. to create new texts that will more accurately convey the artist’s color
palette.
For intermedial studies, the analysis of the relationship between color terms and exemplars is an
important aspect, primarily in terms of paintings, their colors, and shades [20, 26]. Such linguistic
research can serve as a basis for literary scholars in their search for the interaction between literary and
pictorial works, analysis of the poetics of a literary text describing paintings, identification of the
influence of painting on the writer’s style, linguistic characteristics of the text, etc. Such an analysis can
serve as a basis for translators and editors of biographical works about artists or texts about paintings,
as it can facilitate searching, identify quantitative and qualitative characteristics, explain and analyze
how color terms are related to the colors and shades of the original paintings.
Figure 15: Paintings by Van Gogh in 1888. A screenshot from the Van Gogh Museum website
The developed methodology of corpus-based research of color terms can be applied to the analysis
of other biographical novels by I. Stone, for example, The Passionate Journey, and The Agony and the
Ecstasy, as well as texts from the epistolary corpus of Vincent van Gogh and other artists. The proposed
algorithm of analysis can be applied to the study of biographical novels about artists in other literatures,
such as Soutine’s Last Journey by Ralph Dutli’s, Saturn (Black Images from Lives of the Goya Family
Men) by Jacek Dehnel, Self-Portrait of an Artist in Maturity by Mykhailo Slaboshpytskyi, A Lonely
Traveler Walks a Lonely Road by V. Domontovych, The Landscape Artist by Stanislav Stetsenko, Self-
Portrait from the Imagination of Volodymyr Yavorivskyi, Lunia i Modigliani by Silvia Zientek, The
Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver, Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier, etc.
4. Conclusion
Corpus-based methods make it possible to compile a statistical profile of the use of color terms in
the text of a literary work, to process them depending on the purpose according to a number of
characteristics, in particular, to identify the dominant compatibility with different thematic groups of
lexis, to comprehensively analyze their functioning in the work, to compare the frequency of color terms
in other texts of a particular linguistic culture.
Thus, the profile of the studied text is formed by the following colors: black, yellow, blue, white,
red, green, grey, brown, orange, violet, etc. It has been revealed that black is a dominant color term in
the novel, the frequency of which is almost twice as high as the frequency of the next color – white.
The dominance of black and, in general, the frequency of use of black and white differs significantly
from the frequency of use of these lexemes within the English linguistic culture, in particular its
American variant, which can be naturally explained by both the theme of the text and the author’s
creative intention. The text of the analyzed novel is characterized by a high frequency of use of such
color terms as yellow and blue. It should be noted that the significance of yellow and blue is manifested
in the use of a variety of shades. At the same time, the frequencies of use of white, brown, pink, and
purple in Stone’s text and in COCA are comparable.
Quantitative analysis of color terms should be combined with qualitative analysis, since a significant
number of lexemes denoting color, in particular the colors of the spectrum, in addition to their direct
meaning, convey figurative and symbolic meanings and are components of phraseological units, which
are revealed in the course of contrastive research.
The article outlines the research strategy, methods, and algorithm of analysis that can be applied to
other similar texts, primarily biographical works about painters, as well as their translations into other
languages. Researchers argue that many of Van Gogh’s paintings have changed color since they were
created, including his Field with Irises near Arles, Bedroom in Arles, and others [see, for example, 23].
This factor needs to be taken into account by scholars and non-fiction writers, therefore, creating a
database of color terms based on the artist’s correspondence or other materials can facilitate the search
for descriptions of paintings.
Corpus-based methods can be helpful for translators of works of fiction and other genres; editors of
original works and translations who edit texts; researchers who study ideostyle of writers or analyze
artworks where it is necessary to choose the most accurate shade of color; lexicographic practice;
developers of software related to linguistic tasks, etc.
The prospect of our study is the translation aspect of the analysis, in particular of color terms in
biographical works about van Gogh and the artist’s letters and their translations using corpus-based
methods.
5. References
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