Color Semantics in the Japanese Language (on the Basis of Internet Discourse Corpus Studies)

The focus of this graduation project is put on the analysis of context-based color term use and color name semantics in today's realities. The project consists of 132 pages, including 68 pages of appendix (two charts). The reference list contains 47 entries.  The object of the study is the color term vocabulary in the Japanese segment of the Internet. The subject is the semantics of color terms.   There are two chapters in the work, the first chapter being devoted to the history of the issue and the major approaches to evaluating the structure of the color name meaning are reviewed. The second chapter describes the distribution of color terms in various contexts, their most frequent collocations and their connotations, as represented in the corpus. This study is the first to address the issue by employing corpus method and content analysis to conduct the experimental part of the research.  NINJAL-TWC (National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics Tsukuba Web Corpus), a database containing more than 1100 million words from 350 thousand Internet sources, is used as a primary source. As a result, abstract, complex and adnominative color term semantics has been scrutinized on contemporary material and reflected upon in connection to the intensifying impact of such processes as globalization and informatization.  Keywords: Japan, Tsukuba Web Corpus (TWC), semantics, color terms