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CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF GENDER DIFFERENCES IN LINGUISTIC CREATIVITY IN DESCRIBING COLOURS

I. Olehnovica, S. Liepa, V. Saudina

Abstract

The paper presents the results of a synchronic interdisciplinary study, which combines the approaches pertaining to sociolinguistics (gender studies), contrastive linguistics (the data analysed have been obtained from an unconstrained colour describing experiment, the participants of which are native speakers of Latvian and English), and cognitive linguistics. The aim of the study is to find out commonalities and differences in the way respondents – native speakers of Latvian and English – describe (rather than simply name) different hues, tints, shades and tones. The participants of the experiment are males and females (N=40) aged 20 to 30. The respondents’ task was to provide written description of hues, tints, shades and tones presented in colour samples. The results of the study confirm the findings of the previous studies on gender differences in naming colours, namely, that females tend to use more elaborated colour vocabulary, with more descriptors and non-basic monolexemic terms, as well as more positive (pleasurable) words than men (see, for instance, [1] and [2]), but, since the focus of the present study is the respondents’ linguistic creativity in describing rather than naming colours, the results testify to the fact that among the participants of this study those are male speakers of English and female speakers of Latvian who are linguistically more creative when describing numerous shades, tones and tints of one and the same hue.

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/SWS.ISCAH.2019.2/S09.054

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