Comparative study on the terms of color in French and Korean
Etude comparative des termes de couleur en français et en coréen
Résumé
This paper deals with the semantico-syntactic analysis of color terms in French and in Korean. For each language I examine the distributional properties of four color categories, based upon the classification of French color adjectives proposed by Ch. Molinier (2001), i.e. basic color terms (black), derived color terms (blackish), direct specification color terms (dark) and other characterizing color terms (loud). It is shown that the predicate function of different syntactic structures can not be assumed by the same types of color terms in French and in Korean and that this can be accounted for by the different morpho-syntactic properties of color terms in both languages. Indeed, in Korean, the color terms belong to predicative words and assign a property to the subject or thematic constituent, while the French color terms are adjectives and refer to a noun.