SEMANTICS AND MEANING OF TERMS WITH THE COMPONENT ’RED’

The article provides an analysis of the results of a study on the semantics and meanings of terms with the component red in modern Bulgarian. The language material on which basis the study was carried out is an electronic corpus of Bulgarian language texts compiled from publicly available internet sources. Statistical approaches to search for concordances and collocations available through the Sketch Engine lexicographic software were used to discover the terms in the corpus, and the order in the search procedures (algorithm) was previously tested in other cited studies. The theoretical approach of the study involves tracing the semantics and meanings of terms for the color red and terms with the component red using both traditional approaches such as the theory of nomination (by detection of the main semantic component), and modern theories, such as the theory of prototypes (by evaluation of color’s prototypes) in the analysis of the semantics of these terms. Results and examples of high-frequency contextual corpus usages of red are provided to analyze the terms’ semantics and meanings both as a color term and terms with other (non-color) meanings (prototypes and terms of the basic features of the prototypes), and related conclusions on semantics and meanings of these terms are provided. The color component of the terms at issue is interpreted in the context of a broader understanding of color (such as macro-color), in its transition to other colors, and it is also noted that those terms relate to similar terms with a color component, for example white, establishing a semantic relation through the macro-color component.