The Behaviour of Colour Terms in Jordanian Arabic: Lexical and Grammatical Evidence

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to provide grammatical and lexical evidence in support of primary color terms in Jordanian Arabic, henceforth, JA. The general framework is to investigate the behavior of basic color terms in some lexical or grammatical processes and to prove that their behavior supports the division proposed by Kay and McDanial (1978) between primary and derived color terms. The evidence is distilled from various sources including: the templates used for the two groups of color terms, the feminine templates utilized in each group; the plural templates used in each group; reduplication; the parts of speech derived from each color; the variety of color terms; and the frequency of each color in daily usage.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n6s4p44