The Hungarian colour terms piros and vörös

Abstract

A number of studies have been written on the Hungarian colour terms piros and voros, both denoting ‘red’, focusing on either one of the following questions: (1) disambiguating the meanings of the two terms; or (2) their status in Hungarian as basic colour terms. The present paper attempts to resolve these issues in one go by adopting a combined approach of corpus and cognitive linguistics. The paper makes the following three hypotheses: (1) as voros had more time to undergo idiomatization, there will be significant differences and systematic trends between the type/token ratios of the two terms; (2) piros is a more generic term used for a larger and looser range of concepts, while voros is associated with a more limited range of concepts; and (3) piros is mostly used in its primary, literal sense, while voros is more inclined to be used in a figurative sense. After a thorough corpus and cognitive linguistic analysis of data extracted from the updated Hungarian National Corpus, the paper comes to the gener...