Colours the Words Cast

Christopher S. Butler taught linguistics at the University of Nottingham for many years and then held a professorial position at what is now York St John University, UK. He retired in 1998. His research interests include theoretical and descriptive aspects of form, meaning and use, within the framework of a functional approach to language, mainly but not exclusively in English and Spanish. Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen is Professor Emerita at Ghent University, Belgium. Her research interests include functional approaches to grammatical issues in English, with a special focus on modality, and contrastive grammar of English, French and Dutch.

• 1. Prologue: aims of the study and structure of the book.- 2. Studying colour in poetry, with particular reference to the poems of Dylan Thomas.- 3. Corpus of poems and methodology.- 4. Accounts of symbolic associations of colours with other domains.- 5. Frequency data.- Part II: Chromatic primary basic colour terms and related non-basic terms.- 6. Green.- 7. Red, blue and yellow.- Part III: Achromatic primary basic colour terms and related non-basic terms.- 8. White.- 9. Black.- Part IV: The remaining colour terms.- 10. Secondary basic colour terms: brown and grey – but why not pink, purple or orange?- 11. Non-basic metonymic colour terms derived from the names of metals: gold(en) and silver.- 12. Summarising modification of basic colour terms and distribution of colour words among entity types.- 13. The use of more than one colour word in a poem.- 14. Epilogue: a kaleidoscope of colour.