Gloomy Images of Yellow and Żółty in a Corpus-Based Cognitive Study

Abstract

The outcomes confirm a conceptual proximity reflected in the semantics of these colour terms, which seems to be - perhaps surprisingly - incongruous with the popular association of yellow/żółty with the sun. As the evidence provided by the British National Corpus and the Polish Scientific Publishers' corpus (PWN) reveals, the central and peripheral readings are inspired by the imagery of autumnal and physiological changes, while the semantics of both yellow and żółty reflect the significant influence of cultural factors, unparalleled in the polysemies of the other five basic colour terms.