Color in “A Farwell to Arms” and “For Whom the Bell Tolls” by E. Hemingway: a comparative cognitive linguistic analysis.
Abstract
. The article offers a comprehensive comparison of semantic and cognitive linguistic properties of color terms in the novels A Farewell То Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls by E. Hemingway. The methodology leveraged in the paper combines key procedures of semantic, contextual, and conceptual kinds of analysis. The first stage of the research aimed to reveal peculiarities and frequency of usage of three aspects of color (hue, saturaton, brightness) and certain colors in each novel. In both of them, hue dominates. Despite differences in the number of the used hues, their relative frequency is similar, manifesting the prevalence of white, gray, red, black, and brown colors. During the second stage, the axiological charge of color terms in E. Hemingway’s novels was analyzed. As we have established, positively charged colors prevail in A Farewell То Arms, whereas For Whom the Bell Tolls doesn’t display a significant discrepancy between the usage of color terms with positive and negative connotations. In the former novel, white, brown, green, blue, and yellow colors have positive evaluation, while in the latter, the same is true of brown and green. Negative charge is symptomatic of gray in black in A Farewell То Arms and red and black in For Whom the Bell Tolls. In both novels, saturation is mostly negatively charged, whereas brightness is charged positively. At the third stage, the conceptual organization of colored objects in both novels was analyzed. To do that, we applied the notions of conceptual sphere and domain used in cognitive linguistics in combination with basic propositional schemas (BPS). This conceptual organization proved to be similar for both novels, where colored objects from the domains BODY PARTS and ARTEFACTS within the conceptual sphere HUMAN dominate. Generally, color schemes of E. Hemingway’s novels A Farewell То Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls were found to be essentially similar in their qualitative and quantitative parameters.
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ILLUSTRATIVE MATERIAL
Hemingway, E. (1929). A Farewell То Arms. New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s sons.
Hemingway, E. (1940). For Whom the Bell Tolls. Philadelphia, PA: The Blakiston Company.
