Colouring COMPARA: contrastive and monolingual colour studies in English and Portuguese

Abstract

We will describe the English and Portuguese colour studies carried out using COMPARA (www.linguateca.pt/COMPARA/) as a result of the semantic annotation process of the corpus regarding colour. The aim of these studies is to analyse the use of colour by English- and Portuguese-speaking authors by quantifying data, identifying patterns and tendencies -- including colour variation analysis throughout time -- and contrasting findings. Taking advantage of the fact that COMPARA is syntactically analysed (automatically by the PALAVRAS parser and then manually revised and documented for the Portuguese part, and automatically by CLAWS for the English part), this paper will include a colour-related morphosyntactic analysis, of both English and Portuguese.