Colour naming and use preferences in Spanish text typologies (1492−1700)

Abstract

This article is intended to provide a quantitative analysis of colour names and their appearance in certain text typologies between 1492 and 1700. The terms for colour increased in Spain’s Golden Age because of the need to describe Spanish and American reality in detail. A review of the specialised literature has provided us with a lexicon of 499 terms of which 277 colour words are recorded in Golden Age documents according to various diachronic corpora. The method for collecting and analysing texts has provided a lexicon of 66 terms for colour with different degrees of preference for a specific type of document. In addition, 23 of these words have been found to indicate greater numerical specialisation by typology. These lexical units are mediaeval terms used especially in scientific prose and lyric, followed by historiography and society prose. These quantitative data represent the initial stage of research to which other issues must be added in the future such as the context in which these terms appear and the semantic changes that occur in each of the texts.