Constructing Parallel Multidimensional Chromatic Lexicons for Corpus-Assisted Analysis of Russian and English Texts
2026-08-03 • Computation and Language
Computation and Language
AI summaryⓘ
The authors created two detailed lists of color-related words, one for Russian and one for English, to help study how colors are used in poetry. They tested these lists by looking at poems by Russian poet Andrei Bely and American poet Emily Dickinson, checking how often and in what ways color words appeared. Their analysis showed clear differences in how the poets used colors, with Bely using confirmed color terms more often than Dickinson. This study provides a clear method for building and using color word lists in multiple languages for literary analysis.
corpus linguisticscolour termslexicon constructionhuesaturationtemperaturetext analysispoetrymultilingual studies
Authors
Larisa Nikitina
Abstract
This article addresses the relative scarcity of research tools for the corpus-assisted linguistic analysis of colour terms in literary texts. It describes the development of two multidimensional chromatic lexicons: one for Russian (224 entries) and one for English (141 entries). Lexicon construction involved sourcing colour vocabulary from specialised resources and research literature, comparing the two language inventories, manually checking translated candidates, and addressing language-specific morphological features. In addition to identifying colour terms and visual descriptors, the lexicons classify entries according to hue, saturation, and temperature. To demonstrate their practical application, a pilot study was conducted on purposively sampled corpora of poetry by Andrei Bely (20,373 tokens) and Emily Dickinson (28,479 tokens). All retrieved matches were checked in context and classified as Confirmed_chromatic, Ambiguous_visual, or Excluded. The analysis was implemented in two main stages: a strict analysis including confirmed chromatic lexis only, followed by a sensitivity analysis incorporating both confirmed and ambiguous chromatic lexis to determine whether coding decisions about borderline cases affected the main findings. The quantitative results indicated marked differences in the use of colour terms, visual descriptors, hue, saturation, and temperature. Specifically, the analysis revealed that confirmed chromatic terms occurred 3.4 times more frequently in the sampled Bely corpus than in the Dickinson corpus. These findings demonstrate the analytical value of a multidimensional approach, with the main contribution of this study being a transparent and reusable procedure for constructing and applying multilingual chromatic lexicons.