Conceptualizing achromaticity

Abstract

The word for grey has been studied in different languages as part of the definition of basic colour terms, and in historical linguistics some studies have addressed grey as their main focus. The Finnish basic colour term harmaa (‘grey’) has been addressed before in data from early to mid-twentieth century and as a basic colour term, but in contemporary language harmaa has not been analysed with corpus methods before. This study presents the semantics of harmaa in written communicational use of language, internet conversation, in the framework of Cognitive Grammar and access semantics, using qualitative corpus analysis. The study results show that the shade or set of shades that harmaa profiles in different contexts vary, and surface textures, mood, or evaluative aspects can also be profiled. However, more studies are needed to reveal the semantics of harmaa in different interactional situations.